• I was afraid I’d dislike the washed out color palate since that’s one of the things that I dislike so much about contemporary movies, but it still looks good here. Gee, who would have thought that Spielberg would be an innovator or at least early adopter of a new trend and do a great job with it, and then it would go on to have a cancerous effect on the entire industry?

-Although there are some already dated elements, like people still using some sort of what are basically computer discs, this is one does one of the best jobs I can think of imagining futuristic computer interfaces. Those hologram home movies look like shit though. Not on a special effects level, but on a “I think most people would rather have flat videos” level.

-The exposition is all pretty skillful, and the movie has it’s cake and eats it to when balancing whether to dump the viewer in to an unfamiliar sf situation or explain it to them. We get to figure out the opening scene for ourselves and then get a bunch of exposition that is not awkward and that recaps everything we just learned & fills in the gaps.

-The most 2002 things in the movie are the precog visions, which really feel like something from an early 2000s horror movie.

-It doesn’t really have the same plot as the PKD story but it’s clearly based on it, which is fine. Neither one is just a worse version of the other in a different medium.

-In the PDK story, the precogs are implied to be mutations created by a nuclear war (and they look alot grosser, more in the vein of Quato from Total Recall, and are described using language that sounds offensive now), in the movie they’re crack babies. The movie takes place in 2054. I don’t think they give the ages of the precogs, but Samantha Morton, who played Agatha, was 24. So we should probably expect a new illegal drug that created precog babies in the 5 years or so.

-I don’t have alot of complaints, but the sub-Temple of Doom gross out gags did not need to be here. The big FX chase scene is mostly good, but some of the “lol, trashing working class people’s houses” stuff felt tonally off. The part where he’s on a conveyor belt in a factory while a car gets built around him reminds me that there’s a factory chase in the Star Wars movie that came out the same year. I haven’t seen Attack of the Clones since it was in theaters, but the scene in Minority Report looks better now than that one did when I saw it 23 years ago.

-Tim Blake Nelson’s acting isn’t so much bad as just something that belongs in a different movie.

-The stuff with the adds is both funny in itself and is funny in that these companies presumably paid for product placement that is obviously meant to feel completely dystopian. Is The Gap still something kids think is cool?

-I went to check how many movie Tom Cruise made between this and Battlefield Earth, but I see that he wasn’t in Battlefield Earth and I was just thinking that he was because he’s the most inner-circle Scientologist celebrity. One thing I actually do remember hearing about as a case where he kind of broke ranks was Eyes Wide Shut, which the CoS was not happy with him for making. If this guess is true then it’s probably not going to be public information, but wouldn’t it be hilarious of being kept out of Battlefield Earth was his punishment for making Eyes Wide Shut?