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Regular Feature | Film Reviews Hitchcock, John Ford, Spielberg's own oeuvre, and so many others that I lost count of the mounting allusions—everything from The Big Sleep and L.A. Confidential, to The Fugitive and FortApache is referenced, and numerous of Dick's works. The most significant connection is to A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick 1971). While on the run, Anderton must have his eyes fully replaced to avoid detection by ubiquitous retinal scanners that track a person everywhere he/she goes (devices that, significantly, make 2054's Washington D.C. an Orwellian police state without ever having to mention Big Brother). The fact that the doctor performing this operation, Solomon (Peter Stormare), is a sleazy butcher whomAnderton once arrested underscores the moral depravity oíMinority Report's world, but more intriguing is how the film focuses on Anderton's new vision—of a more morally compromised world—after the surgery, leading him to dismantle the system he has championed for years. This development subtly rewrites the regression that Alex (Malcolm McDowell) experiences in A Clockwork Orange after criminal rehabilitation forces his eyes open to watch video horrors and to condition him against committing violence. For Anderton, the forcible eye replacement provides him with a new surface identity, causing an inevitable, deeper alteration in his character as he recognizes Pre-Crime's fundamental inequities and the extent of the Pre-Cogs' enslavement This sequence also features virtuoso cinematography as the camera floats above the different apartments of the run-down building in which the operation occurs, showing all the various occupants' actions in a single shot that not only recalls both Rear Window (Hitchcock 1955) and Touch ofEvil (Welles 1958), but also implicates the camera itselfin the tangled, morally bankrupt voyeurism at the heart of the Pre-Cogs' visions. The D.C. authorities do not simply spy on their citizenry, but on what they might do at a future time. Spielberg makes this point so artfully that one never feels thatMinorityReportis amessage film. Rather, it is a serious examination ofa serious theme told so entertainingly that the viewer can consider the story on multiple levels. The film's ending has generated intense discussion, much of it negatively stating that Spielberg artificially brightens Dick's pessimism by retreating to rank sentimentality. Nothing could be further from the truth. While the short story ends with Pre-Crime intact, it includes the tepid hope that Witwer, the agency's new director, will dismantle the system because he can run afoul of it just as easily as Anderton has. The film's conclusion sees PreCrime discontinued and the Pre-Cogs freed to live in peace. However, the final shot of the Pre-Cogs quietly reading crime novels sees them sitting in a loose circle, inside an isolated house surrounded by water. This mise-en-scene reminds the thoughtful viewer ofthe circular water tank in which the Pre-Cogs are forced by Pre-Crime to see the future, making the point that their talent still isolates them from human contact. Likewise, the saddened expression in Cruise's eyes duringAnderton's final appearance is so evocative ofthe emotional pain he has endured that the audience knows his healing process has only begun. Even more significant is the fact that, when Änderten is captured andjailed, alive but immobile in a containment unit that keeps his mind occupied inside a virtual world, Gideon says that "In there all your dreams can come true." This single comment, so easily missed, suggests that the film's final 20 minutes are in fact a delusion by the still incarcerated Anderton, whose greatest desire is to escape and destroy Pre-Crime. The fleeting possibility that Anderton sees what he wishes to see makes Minority Report a lesson in ambiguity as perplexing as Dick's 1969 novel Ubik, in which recently deceased characters exist in a state of "half-life" that allows their consciousness to survive in a nebulous world of imagery and desire. MinorityReport encodes this possibility, like many of its themes, with a subtlety that avoids pretentious moralizing. Like Blade Runner, Spielberg's film is all the richer for the effort. Unlike Scott's film, Minority Report has not been critically...