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In The Fugitive, an innocent Harrison Ford ran from the law and tried to catch the real bad guys. Matt Damon makes a similar run this week in The Bourne Identity, with one major difference—he is a killer (with amnesia, no less).

Meanwhile, Tom Cruise is running from the cops in Minority Report. He has an even tougher challenge. The evidence says that he will kill someone in the future.

There's running everywhere you look this week. Nicolas Cage is dodging bullets in World War II as he protects the life of a Navajo codebreaker in Windtalkers. And speaking of running and dodging: Scooby-Doo is running from critics, dodging bad reviews.

Few critics will be able to discuss Steven Spielberg's Minority Report without bringing up Blade Runner. Both futuristic sci-fi stories came from the same author, Phillip K. Dick. And both artfully explore questions about free will, revenge, human arrogance, technology, justice, mercy, and God. As if in acknowledgement of that, Spielberg begins his film almost identically: with a deeply resonant bass note and the title of the film against a black screen.

But after that, the film takes new directions. This is not Blade Runner's bleak, dark metropolis. It's a spacious, bright, open city dominated by technology and information, one that seems far more possible. Washington, D.C., is quite recognizable. The spiffy sci-fi cars that crowd future rush hours suggest this is the same future we saw in Spielberg's last film, A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The hi-tech tools of Minority Report's world are clever, impressive, and so bounteous that they become almost too distracting. Example: Advertising follows the hero everywhere, and because sensors can identify him easily, each audio commercial appeals to his attention by calling out his name.

Our hero is John Anderton (Tom Cruise), a D.C. policeman in the newly established "pre-crime" unit. Pre-crime works like this: a special trio of psychics foresees upcoming crimes. Then the cops rush to identify and apprehend the crook-to-be before the crime occurs. The system seems perfect. It's not. It's a human construct and thus there's a flaw somewhere. Anderton learns this the hard way when he's named as a pre-murderer. He panics, and thus the film's tagline: "Everybody runs." At this point, the film becomes a futuristic version of The Fugitive, with Cruise as the runner, while Colin Farrell plays the Tommy Lee Jones part as his pursuer.

Does "pre-crime" sound implausible? Not really, as Jeremy Lott (who has written for Christianity Today and Books & Culture) points out in Reason. Right now U.S. leaders are debating the ethics of pre-emptive strikes against rogue nations that have the potential to attack us but haven't yet. How far should we go to ensure our own safety? Do we have the right to violently punish people when we are only somewhat certain they intend to do harm?

Reviews for the film will pour in this weekend, and we'll scan through them next week. It will undoubtedly cause Spielberg's fans and critics to debate with the same vigor that characterized conversations about A.I.

My full review is posted at Looking Closer. I came out of the sneak preview eager to see it again. This is Spielberg's most entertaining and exciting film since Raiders of the Lost Ark. After a long spell with ponderous "issue" movies and the burden of completing a Kubrick project, Spielberg seems positively giddy to be back in action-movie mode. His imagination runs circles around other sci-fi filmmakers, and the supremely gifted cinematographer Janusz Kaminski makes those ideas beautiful to behold. A.I., their last collaboration, seems dull by comparison. Yet, as the visual wonders fly past, Spielberg accomplishes something that George Lucas doesn't—he builds the movie on the firm foundation of his actors, giving them visceral, compelling interaction, and drawing strong performances from the whole cast.

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June (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46