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Tuesday, 2 July, 2002, 15:14 GMT 16:14 UK
Minority Report
Steven Spielberg's latest film Minority Report starring Tom Cruise. (Edited highlights of the panel's review)
MARK LAWSON:
ROSIE BOYCOTT: Would the person really be a criminal, or could you have stopped them? There's masses of things where you longed for some intelligent dialogue to actually happen, rather than just thundering through. And there's lots of strange inconsistencies in it. You have three people lying in bath tubs, called the precogs. They are a bit like these old-fashioned soothsayers. They come up with someone's name, and the ball rolls out, and it's rather like the lottery. You have this image of Mystic Meg somehow standing behind, and you hold this ball. Then the movie is continually inconsistent. You have the highest tech cars in the world that are going round and round in circles, and they go up and down buildings, and then the next scene you're in some wonderful little playground where there's a very old-fashioned roundabout going round. You don't quite know the future Spielberg has got you in. It's as though when he gets a really good idea, like this wonderful moment where they've got newspaper headlines, and they're moving as the news changes and the weather changes. And you go, "That's wonderful", and then you're on to something else. It somehow doesn't quite add up, but I really enjoyed it.
MARK LAWSON:
TOM PAULIN:
MARK LAWSON:
TOM PAULIN: What worried me about it was the oppressive state, the corporate republic, which we're hearing about all the time. The way it invades the private life completely, and takes everyone over. The great thing about eyes and identity, and an eye for an eye, is present in that, but Tom Cruise began to remind me of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber. With that sort of blank, fanatical Scotch-Irish quality. And then I thought, "What's happening here?". Then I began to think of Gore Vidal on Timothy McVeigh. Then I began to wonder whether Cruise knew what he was doing, because he's a blank actor, not a very talented actor, and I didn't enjoy him. But I do think Spielberg is wonderful.
MARK LAWSON:
GERMAINE GREER: There they are in a bath of proton milk, because we all know that life is in a Petri dish, so they're all put in the biggest Petri dish you could imagine. They're being kept alive by strange nutrients, and they're being filled with drugs, and their mental visions are being transferred to video. Fine, fine, the technology is all great, and that's the one thing that'll turn out to be true.
MARK LAWSON:
GERMAINE GREER: What fascinated me was, and I'm not sure how deliberate this was, the vision of the technocratic society, where the technocrats live, hermetically sealed against the rest of the world. They are taken from their places of work to their homes, and the great thing is that underneath is the unregenerate society, where people live in filth and squalor, where they're thwarted and sick and angry. It's like the message of "1984". In order to survive his own system, Anderton has to go down into the filth. He has to be operated on by a man who sneezes snot all over his hand before he picks up the scalpel.
MARK LAWSON:
ROSIE BOYCOTT:
GERMAINE GREER:
MARK LAWSON:
GERMAINE GREER:
GERMAINE GREER:
TOM PAULIN:
MARK LAWSON:
ROSIE BOYCOTT:
TOM PAULIN:
ROSIE BOYCOTT:
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