By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 1 hour ago

While he’s captivating in dramas like Jerry Maguire, Eyes Wide Shut, and Vanilla Sky (a personal favorite), Tom Cruise is always at his best in action movies. That’s partially because of his personal charm. The same quirks that make him one of the weirdest celebrities also help him convincingly play cocky, gun-toting leading men. Additionally, Cruise has such a mania for doing his own stunts that he’s constantly risking his life for movies like Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. He’s one of the richest people in the world, and he’s willing to possibly die to keep the movie business alive. In that sense, it’s hard to find a more compelling actor in all of Hollywood.

With that being said, some of Cruise’s best movies now feel almost painfully dated. Top Gun isn’t quite as thrilling with the collapse of the USSR, and Eyes Wide Shut feels downright tame after learning about the crimes of people like Jeffrey Epstein. Even the Mission: Impossible movies seem tame once you realize how much actual spycraft is less running around on top of trains and more hacking into computers half a world away. However, Cruise’s best movie was oddly prescient, and over two decades later, it’s scarier now than ever before. I’m talking about Minority Report (2002), a movie that accidentally predicted the technological panopticon of our modern world.

Can You Get Pregnant From Precrime?

The plot of Minority Report is that the police of the future are now using “precogs,” which are enhanced humans who can receive psychic visions of the future. Thanks to them, the cops can now predict future transgressions and arrest people before they have even committed the crime. The chief of this Precrime division believes in the system, hoping it can prevent crimes like the tragic abduction of his six-year-old son. However, when the precogs predict the chief will kill a man he has ever known, he must go on the run to prove his innocence. Along the way, he discovers secrets that rock his foundations to their very core.

Minority Report is filled to the brim with great character actors, including early performances from icons Jessica Capshaw and Peter Stormare. Additionally, we get a stunning performance from screen legend Max von Sydow, whose Precrime director holds all the cards in a game that only he truly understands. Arguably, the film’s best revelation is Colin Farrell, who plays a DOJ agent investigating Precrime. Thanks to Farrell’s relentless and charismatic performance, Minority Report became his breakout film, catapulting the talented actor into superstar status. He has a particularly magnetic chemistry with Tom Cruise, and their onscreen feud encapsulates the movie’s crunchy theme of balancing community safety with personal liberty. 

Feral Colin

Speaking of Cruise, he is at his best in this film. He spends most of Minority Report on the run, and Cruise is predictably great in bringing this film’s frenetic action scenes to life. But what really makes this performance special is that Cruise fully animates the pathos of his character, someone whose professional success hides personal tragedy: he’s a divorcee who lost his only child, and he secretly uses drugs to mask his personal pain. Cruise presents his action hero as a man whose righteous cause is actually the ultimate coping mechanism. To prove his innocence, he must prove the fallibility of Precrime, effectively destroying the only thing that gives his life meaning.

While these actors deserve full credit for making Minority Report the most provocative sci-fi film of the early aughts, it’s also important to lavish praise on director Steven Spielberg. This film is the perfect mixture of beloved tropes from his other movies: Minority Report has a charismatic leading man as charismatic as Raiders of the Lost Ark, a dangers-of-technology plot as compelling as Jurassic Park, and the relentless, ongoing chase sequences of Catch Me If You Can. In another director’s hands, this might have felt like a lazy homage to his own work. However, Spielberg is skilled enough to effortlessly weave what worked in his other movies into something that feels startlingly fresh. 

You Hate To See It

Over two decades after its release, it’s clear that Minority Report was also startlingly prescient. Obviously, the concept of humans with psychic powers snitching for the comics remains a far-off and (God willing) impossible reality. But in the decades since this film was first released, America has led the way in developing groundbreaking technology and then using it to transform the country into a bleak panopticon. This began immediately after 9/11, of course, when the government used the Patriot Act to justify spying on just about anyone while circumventing existing laws. This kick-started a national debate about the chief theme of Minority Report: whether it’s worth sacrificing our freedom in the name of security.

Obviously, we lost that debate, and the country has started to look more and more like the dystopian setting of Minority Report. The police use algorithms to predict where crimes are likeliest to occur, and they scour social media for clues that someone is likely to commit future transgressions. This works hand-in-hand with automated surveillance technology that records your face and activities in almost every public space. On paper, these collective technologies are a great way to establish law and order throughout the community. But it’s an open secret that corrupt police officers use this tech to strike fear in our hearts while providing convenient narratives for anyone they want to arrest.

The Future Is Now, Old Man

In Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s character is framed for murder by someone with intimate knowledge of how to abuse cutting-edge police technology. In the modern world, though, things are much more streamlined. Your online sh*tposting can be used to establish you as a dangerous threat, and you can end up on government watchlists without ever knowing it. Unknowingly walking through a high-crime area can make you a suspect when the cops simply need a convenient fall guy. Wherever you walk, drive, or fly, automated surveillance captures footage that can be used against you without even a shred of evidence. The future is now, and the entire justice system is one huge Precrime division.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to escape the modern police state. However, you can still escape the old-fashioned way: by watching an awesome movie in the comfort of your own home. Minority Report is streaming on Hulu, giving you a chance to watch what is arguably Tom Cruise’s best film. You also have a chance to compare Spielberg’s worst nightmares about abusive technology to the myriad real ways that bleeding-edge tech is used to make our lives worse. It’s the ultimate irony, really: in making a film about psychics, Spielberg accurately and effectively predicted the future. Here’s hoping he gets to keep making movies; otherwise, he might be drafted into becoming America’s first precog!