Seven mistakes the movie Minority Report made about the future

When making the 2002 film Minority Report, about a policing system in the future Washington, DC, that use psychics to stop murders before they happen, Stephen Spielberg famously invited a group of experts to speculate on what the United States would look like in 2054, technologically speaking.

Certainly, the gesture-controlled screens used by Chief of PreCrime John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) were right on the money, even though the witnesses to Anderton’s swiping skills seem a little too impressed, considering the technology would have been around for more than 40 years by then. It’s like today being agog by someone’s effective microwave use.

I love the movie and rank it up there with Spielberg’s best and most philosophical. But with the hindsight (or foresight?) we have in 2015, it’s clear that many of the movie’s guesses are a little off.

• Where is the geopositioning technology? PreCrime gets the names of victims and potential killers, and the time of the crime, which is very convenient. So most of its work is finding and getting to the location of the future crime. The widespread use of geopositioning in smart phones, coupled with the increasing use of drones, means that, by 2054, finding someone might be the easiest part of any criminal investigation. In Minority Report’s opening scene, the investigators work their asses off to figure out which Howard Marks is about to kill his wife and her lover. Even in 2015, they could have used Facebook to quickly find which Howard Marks was married, where he lived, whether he hung out and which had signs of unhappiness in his life. Getting to the crime? Gotta love jet packs. Waiting for them to be sold at Canadian Tire.

• Much has been made of Minority Report’s depiction of personalized advertising, where ads call out the names of consumers from digital billboards. Again, smartphones have changed the course of marketing. Marketers don’t shout at us in public now and they likely won’t in the future. Instead, they whisper to us with flashes and beeps and vibrations from our phones, fitbits and maybe our watches or glasses. And the messaging will likely be much less hamfisted than a GAP hologram calling out, “Hello, Mr. Yakamoto, welcome back to the GAP! How did those assorted tanktops work out for you?” Through social media and other relationship-building interaction, retailers will likely know exactly how things worked out before a consumer returns to the store again.

• The GAP in 2054? Try H&M.

• Cars won’t have steering wheels. When pods are travelling along tracks, the most unsafe thing is to give somebody the sense they can control it, as we’ve already learned from Google’s Self-Driving Car project. Spielberg obviously thought things out and figured that cars would drive themselves on special roadways in high-traffic areas, but would be handled in an old-fashioned way in more rural areas. Again, geopositioning technology made such a two-pronged approach unnecessary.

• Moving pieces of plastic around to put images on screens. The transparent-hologramy plastic discs that John Anderton inserts into his home video projector are certainly cool, and the way he scrambles for them evokes pathos around his obsession with his dead son. When detectives pull larger plastic plates out of one screen-machine and stick them into another one, it conveys urgency and seriousness. But even today, we mostly move data through wifi, cellular data connections and, in a pinch, cables. In 2054, getting data from one place to another will be faster, less labour-intensive and require even less material—our concern about reducing waste should be manic by then. All John Anderton’s memories will clog up landfill.

• Newspapers and paper photos. The paper photo is already a dying species, yet they abound in Minority Report.  Spielberg does make newspapers and magazines interactive and updatable, but doesn’t really account for the fact that each periodical will eventually consumed on a single object like a tablet. It’s true that future tablets may look and feel like paper. But the art of newspaper design will have changed by then. Periodicals of the future, whatever form they take, will not emulate the typography and layout of today’s newspapers because they will be an adaptation of tablet content and use Internet-style layouts. Traditional newspaper design will be long dead.

• The need for psychic mutants to predict human behaviour. Big data, drawing from all the information we share about ourselves online, will make the world of Minority Report possible without a supernatural element (or the slavery element—those poor precogs!). Algorithms will interpret our posts and our pictures, using predictive patterns to figure out who’s going to go off the rails and, perhaps before the police are called in, subtly nudging possible perpetrators back from the edge of criminality. The law won’t have to storm in to stop crime; it will manipulate our online reality—increasingly becoming our primary reality—to change our mindset, reschedule encounters and warn potential victims of what may happen.

How a children’s film out-bleaked the season’s three anxiety-causing hits

A note: This piece contains spoilers.

This season’s three runaway critically acclaimed hits—Gravity, Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave—have all leveraged that classic piece of advice about good dramatic writing. Tie the audience to a relatable protagonist, competent yet not inherently heroic. Put that protagonist in jeopardy. Keep him or her there. Put them in more jeopardy. Repeat until the audience can't take it anymore, then go further.

Mortal danger is usually most effective in getting audiences to tense their muscles, clench their jaw and  prepare themselves to look away from the screen if need be, though a filmmaker might go further than that and inflict pain, humiliation, self-doubt and dark pasts upon our worthy avatars. Only when they have totally brutalized us will we accept we’ve seen a great film.

The lightest of this season’s three masochistic masterpieces (which is saying something), Gravity focuses on danger that taps into space-age existential angst. Its harrowing threat is getting lost in infinity, a surprisingly claustrophobic place, more like suffocating in an endless wash of molasses. If Sandra Bullock’s Astronaut Ryan Stone is not attached to something—anything—she will drift into space die. EM Forster probably never imagined so literal a depiction of his maxim “Only connect.”

Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave are more layered and topical, not surprising since both are based on true stories. That’s some reassurance going in—you know they lived to tale the tale. 12 Years even gives you a time limit. Both films lack the technologically produced astral beauty that makes Gravity so watchable. They provide no distraction from their assault.

Tom Hanks’s Phillips, captain of a cargo ship that must pass through Somali pirate territory, faces down humanized blowback from the inequities of abstract global capitalist systems. We in the Western world thought we could hoard the world’s wealth, but, no, the losers in our divided world will find a way to grab something for themselves, putting people who don’t even consider themselves to be on the front lines of this class war in harm’s way. Not of this is spoken. You just pick it up from the setting and the expressions on the characters’ faces.

12 Years a Slave, about a free black man in the US North who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South pre-1865, is even more deeply engaged in social criticism, giving an innocent and naïve free man a dehumanizing guided tour of the savagery that was necessary at all levels to maintain the savage system of slavery. At first Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) suffers under a somewhat sympathetic plantation owner played by Benedict Cumberbatch. I have no recollection of his character’s name is nor do I think I was meant to have one—Cumberbatch is a mere amalgam of everyone who presents themselves as good and kind yet blames “the system” for their failure to act on these supposed virtues. Michael Fassbender, who plays Northup’s second owner is a much more singular character. Who can say whether slavery turned him into a sociopath or whether it merely lured his already warped personality into its horror-filled kingdom?

In all three films, Stone, Phillips and Northup find inner courage and tenacity, if not always to get themselves out of their predicaments, then at least to make the best of it, practically and soulfully. These films’ power comes from their relentlessly sharp focus—the filmmaker’s decision to cut away most of the padding that usually goes into building a world, building characters, explaining context, creating a framework of relationships the audience can grab onto. For directors Alfonso Cuarón, Paul Greengrass and Steve McQueen, it’s all peril from the word go.

Unlike last year’s Life of Pi, for example, which also dropped its protagonist into mortal danger and kept him there, there’s little time spent on the characters’ lives before or after the story’s crisis. Gravity’s biggest flaw was the tacked-on feel of Stone’s backstory (thank God there were no flashbacks to her daughter before her death) while Captain Phillips’s misstep was the perfunctory and clichéd introductory scenes of Phillips’ home life (and Catherine Keener’s bad hair). 12 Years a Slave’s quick introductory sketch of Northup’s family life was certainly the most treacly part of an otherwise unsentimental film, though director Steve McQueen’s worst decision was to cast Brad Pitt as the Jesus-y looking Canadian who “saves” Northup; that role should never have been deified by star power. The films work best when they keep the audience in the moment. Gravity and Captain Phillips, especially, operate almost in real time; 12 Years a Slave just felt like it was that long.

As tough as these films were to watch, their makers realize the pleasure of viewer masochism comes not in the torture itself, but in the release from it. And release they did. All three films deliver short, sharp and astonishingly uncomplicated happy endings—Disney could hardly do better.

Once adrift, Stone returns to Earth’s loving pull; the mud virtually hugs her. Phillips, once he calms down, will go back to his messy haired wife, his cleverness acknowledged and respected, his uptightedness vindicated. When Northrup leaves his slave labour and hops in the carriage that has come to rescue him, we know in that moment that he is free because his white friend has a bigger hat and a more steely-eyed gaze than crazy, crazy Fassbender. We gasp in relief. The momentary worry that Northrup’s wife may have remarried—that his family may not want him back—is quickly pushed aside. Like Hanks in Captain Phillips’ final scene, the audience finally exhales and shudders like a panic attack has just ended.

Tense films, but their happy endings betray their intentions. They want the audience to leave satisfied. Case closed. Our surrogate is home safe. None of them as bleak as Ender’s Game, which messes with the recipe to deliver a darker message that should follow filmgoers home. Yes, darker than slavery because its ideas inform slavery and world history before and after slavery.

Based on a 1980s novel, Ender’s Game is not a well-made film. It had the rushed, clunky feeling of a work that compensates for overcompression of the source material with clunky overexplanation and uneven pacing. Its effort to attract both younger and older audiences leaves it satisfying neither. Many of the performances are laughable—the talented Viola Davis looks like she had no idea what movie she’s in.

But the film’s ending—the revelation that concludes young Ender Wiggin’s (Asa Butterfield) tests and torments as a trainee to lead the Earth’s forces against possible alien invaders—is as far from Hollywood happy as you can get. Most films are about love, courage, strength and trueness to oneself. This one’s about power, tactics and deceit. It nod to empathy as a virtue, but it doesn’t have a heart. Perhaps it hopes the audience has one, but even that’s not certain.

Despite his savvy in combat both personal and intergalactic—perhaps because of this savvy—Ender is bullied by his brother, his peers and his handlers in the future Earth’s military-industrial complex. He’s been recruited as their saviour but, like Harry Potter, is left to figure out the “how” on his own. Excessive violence usually works.

Unlike Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, though, which reveals itself to be a satire of fascism, and which attempts (unsuccessfully, one might argue) to make its audience feel bad for cheering on the humans in their aggression toward the enemy, Ender’s Game’s POV on its fascistic future society is not so clear—are we to despise or admire it?

As a good messiah should, Ender cleverly navigates through all the obstacles put before him and even wins allies. But then, in startling reveal, discovers he’s been had—the obstacles were not what they seemed. What should be a triumphant Hollywood movie ending—he and his team of misfits succeed in a computer simulation of a war against their insect enemies—turns into something radically different. The simulations were actually real. He was not playing an elaborate videogame, he was waging real war. In demonstrating that he could, theoretically, destroy an enemy planet, Ender does destroy an enemy planet. And is filled with not with joy, but remorse. There were other ways of winning, he suspects, that would not have caused so much harm.

The Ender books have been criticized for depicting a protagonist who commits violence but who remains innocent because harm was not his intention. But just because the saviour is untainted, culpability doesn’t vanish. It moves elsewhere. It moves onto the system which lied and manipulated him. The systems humans create are perfectly capable of destroying us, even if those pulling the strings have created technicalities that depersonalize that culpability. Tactics wow us but they are not our humanity.

In Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave (Gravity doesn’t think so much about these themes—how we wreak evil on ourselves), our protagonists are reborn merely by escaping the trials the system has thrown in their way. Once Phillips and Northup are happy, we’re happy.

Ender’s Game doesn’t let us off the hook so easily. If we’re uneasy with a child being manipulated into genocide, the manipulation itself must be unpacked, even if the peril faced by the child has ended.

By delivering their heroes to such clear safety, Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave relieve of us of our worry for the individual we have bonded to. They allow us to put their peril behind us, even though the world that created their troubles continues. Domestic contentment is restored in the foreground.

For all their seriousness, this kind of thrill isn’t so different from what you might get from a roller coaster. Once it’s done, it’s done. In Ender’s Game, we still have much to work through.

Was Brüno mostly filler?

Was it just me or was there something desperate about Sacha Baron Cohen's Brüno?

Baron Cohen and his producers devised mis-en-scène after mis-en-scène to entrap the squeamish and the homophobic (and I don't think they're automatically the same thing--the movie was as much about our fear of sex and eccentricity as it was about homosexuality). But his chosen victims were, for the most part, so controlled, so on message, so "I'm out of here as fast as I possibly can?" that he only managed to squeeze a few brief moments of discomfort out of each of them.

I mean, the setup for Congressman Ron Paul was spectacular--the hotel room, the champagne, the photos, the disappearing act with the pants--but the man did get out of there in the least embarrassing way possible. It was all build, build, build--then the person fled or, like the hunters out camping, turned silent and uncooperative, cinematically speaking.

(Which may be why so much of the movie felt set-up--the spider couldn't attract enough flies into his web. Possible exceptions: Paula Abdul taking about human rights work while, ahem, sitting on a person and the penultimate set piece, where the grudge-match fans cheered on the violence but freaked out on the same-sex kissing. But then, as if to offer an anecdote to all the hate of that scene, Brüno sings a song with celebrities he should be deflating, a set-up that had obviously been negotiated and constructed, which retroactively makes you reevaluate all the "real" incidents you've already seen.)

To fill up the holes in running time, the "plot" was pushed to the forefront with many scenes of Baron Cohen "acting" rather than "intervening." But without an audience, Baron Cohen's flamey performance is something a drag queen would do at home in front of the mirror: overwrought, self-indulgent and self-congratulatory but deeply unconvincing. When people complain that the move made them squirm, I wonder if it's Baron Cohen's interpretation of Brüno, rather than the world around him, that made them feel that way. Who'd want to watch a scripted movie performed this way? I blame the bad acting, though it could be that some audience members have not spent enough time in the underbelly of the gay world in order to set their flamboyancy meters to appropriate tolerance levels.

Even as a stereotype, Baron Cohen was one-note. Where was the defeat, the sliding of the mask in the face of the humiliation of "failing" in Hollywood? Where were the tantrums, the acting out? It's true that gay men construct studier and more ostentatious public personae than others, but it's also true that these constructions frequently falls apart. In this, Baron Cohen was very much a straight man putting on "gay face," afraid to deviate too far from his shtick for fear of striking a wrong note and alienating gay and gay-friendly audiences.

Part of the problem, I suppose, is the success of Borat. And I suppose reality TV shows in general. Even if people don't know it's Baron Cohen, they see the cameras, imagine a scenario where they will be humiliated and pull back.

Success seems to have made Baron Cohen pull back, too. It's the worst mistake a satirist can make: wanting people to like you. You can unflatteringly impersonate a Kazakhstani journalist without ever winking at the audience, because, I'm pretty sure, Kazakhstanis don't buy a lot of movie tickets. Who cares if you hurt their feelings? But the queers--cross them and they can bring you down. With Brüno Baron Cohen has tried to have it both ways--social criticism and conciliation. They are not compatible modes of expression.

Girlfriend/The first Obama era blockbuster

My favourite moment in the new Star Trek movie is near the end when Kirk and Spock are standing side-by-side in front of a screen image of the baddy they have just defeated. Spock, played by Zachary Quinto, who is now my new favourite young Hollywood star, is standing there and he has the look of an aggrieved girlfriend who, having called the offender on his misdeed, is prepared to let her boyfriend do the rest of the work and take pleasure from it.

Okay, well, that was a particularly perverse favourite moment. But the new Star Trek was full of them. It actually managed to answer so many of the complaints I feel I am perennially making against Hollywood blockbusters.

Firstly, there was talking and there was action but you never felt like it was happening in two different movies (I'm talking to you, George Lucas). One scene followed another, mostly made sense and what explaining had to be done was done with subtly and discretion. The story had flow.

Secondly, I could follow the action. Unlike, in, say, The Dark Knight, Star Trek seemed to have both a lighting budget and an editing budget. They actually let me see the fancy interplanetary metropolises for more than a few seconds. Yes, I could take them in. I've never understood why Hollywood filmmakers spend all that money making computer-generated worlds and then don't show them to us. I felt I had made a real visit to the Federation's universe.

Thirdly, it seemed to be about something: friendship. It wasn't heavy or thoughtful and didn't devote long monologues to the subject. It just showed how friendships can happen and how important they are. To ask for a movie with a little bit of meaning isn't to ask for a philosophical treatise. Just pick a piece of life you have something about which to say and shine a light on it.

Fourthly, the characters were likable and I don't think even someone who hadn't seen the 1960s version would disagree with that. Simon Pegg was a little too heavy handed as Scotty, but the rest of the cast walked right up to the fence that said "camp impersonation" and then took one step back. Which brings me to my fifth point: Star Trek proves that you can make a sci-fi film full of explosions and fist-fights and "red matter" gobbledygook and still have fun. There was genuine suspense without everybody being dirty and bitter and overwrought. It was a space adventure--not yet another retread of the apocalypse filmmakers think is necessary to get us excited.

And yet, I will likely see Terminator: Salvation and will likely see all these neurotic tendencies thrown upon the screen with desperation and grim sadism.

From Chandni Chowk to Canada

I've always had a thing for Akshay Kumar, whose Bollywood fame was taking off when I visited India in the early 1990s. So I didn't walk but ran to a downtown screening of his new film Chandni Chowk to China--the title phrase must be spoken a dozen times in the two and a half hour production. It's a funny picture for the studios to market as a cross-cultural crossover. On the surface--and this is a film that's little more than a surface of Chinese location shots, beautiful heroines, broad comedy and hand-to-hand combat--it's very accessible. At least it doesn't feature reincarnation as a plot point. But what the film does do is deconstruct Kumar's own life story. Like his Borat-like protagonist, Akshay grew up in Delhi's cacophonous Chandni Chowk and was a chef before transforming himself into a kung-fu fighting action hero.

His nerdy antics for the film's first two hours are only really funny for anyone over eight years old if you have a sense of his Bollywood reputation as a sex bomb. I guess that makes the film's grand conceit comparable to the use of Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button--we are engaged with the wrinkled old Brad early in the film partly because of our anticipation of eventually seeing the Thelma And Louise hottie that's idealized in our cinematic imagination. Without some kind of Kumar primer, North American audiences lose that layer of meaning (and God knows the film doesn't provide much layering).

My most vivid memory of Kumar is a Stardust magazine photo spread he did in the 1990s, one shot of which had him in a towel, narcissistically sprawled on a foggy mirror. (Sorry, haven't been able to find it online anywhere and I lost my copy years ago.) So in CC2C, the climax is not when our loser hero finally kills the bad guy, but when, after intensive kung-fu training, he takes off his shirt to reveal the Akshay we knew was there under the bad moustache and buttone-up shirt.

Kermode does Hudson

My obsession with Mark Kermode is well known; this priceless mimickry explains why.