Minority Report

Two titans of popular American cinema, together for the first time! We are referring, of course, to Max von Sydow and Tim Blake Nelson. Ha! We joke. ‘Minority Report’, released in 2002, marks the first time that famed director Steven Spielberg worked with Tom Cruise. (Though Max von Sydow and Tim Blake Nelson do appear in the movie, the latter as a delightfully weird future prison warden who plays the pipe organ and spouts aphorisms.)

‘Minority Report’ concerns itself with the lofty concept of free will. In the not-so-distant future, police can detect murders before they happen, thanks to the telepathic abilities of the “pre-cognitives”, a trio of bald people floating in goo. Is this arrangement moral? Is it fallible? We’ll find out when Tom Cruise, the lead detective in charge of the “pre-crime” unit, is himself marked as a would-be murderer.

The movie was well received upon release and seems to have gone on to achieve a degree of even more positive retrospective appraisal. It’s certainly a plotful film – you really have to pay attention to this one. Brian and Hemal did not entirely agree on whether that was a good thing, but they did both appreciate Tom Cruise zipping around the future being chased by proto-fascist police and feeling sad about his dead son.