Spielberg, Cruise: Pull Dick off Well

I once found some website where this dude had developed a theory that Tom Cruise was a robot--it was pretty well-documented, too.

Dude thought he was uncovering a sinister Hollywood/Scientology conspiracy, and planned to find and expose all the other actor robots. Dude might have thought he was in a Philip K. Dick story.

Mental health-wise, thatOs not the best place for a dude to be. Philip K. Dick, an astoundingly prolific and influential science fiction writer of the fifties and sixties, wrote about the warped logics of future worlds where technology and drugs have blurred the boundaries of the big questions, what is human and what is real. Crunchy fodder for a paranoiac, and even riper for cinematic adaptation--one would think that DickOs stories would see more treatment on the big screen, especially since his only two prior adaptations (Blade Runner and Total Recall) are hallmarks of sci-fi noir.

Minority Report lacks the lurking weirdness of Ridley Scott's masterpiece and the, um, three-breasted prostitutes of Schwarzenegger's gore fest, but it still manages to be truer to Dick's spirit than either. It also happens to be one of Steven Spielberg's most cohesive and richest films of the last twenty years.

No small surprise. Last year's bastardized A.I.: Artificial Intelligence suggested that Spielberg was uncomfortable, if not outright incompetent, in a world that asked murkier moral questions than those posed by sharks, dinosaurs and Nazis. (Those three problems occupy just about half of his oeuvre.) Toss him a Philip K. Dick short story, and you're coupling a manchild who tells boyish fantasies with a drug-addled schizo who tells men's nightmares. After all, one of Philip K. Dick's more famous quotes could be Spielberg's anti-mantra: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

But a Spielberg and Dick combo makes more sense than at first it would seem. After all, many of DickOs ideas are so compelling because of a childish simplicity at their fantasy core. In Minority ReportOs case: What if we could foresee--and prevent--murder before it happened? Spielberg does with this premise everything that good science fiction should do--setting up a future world with some societal tweak, developing and pushing the limits of that tweak and finally confronting its consequences.

And as much a humanist as he is visual master, Spielberg brings a compassion to Dick's world that feels right in every way that Kubrick's A.I. vision felt wrong and even creepy. If itOs a bit predictable, a bit long, a bit too invested in playing out the drama to the very end, Minority Report is also a movie whose troubled thematic tug-of-war betwee«n safety and freedom is so astonishingly relevant as to be almost political.