The Movie: Minority Report takes place in the not too distant future where information from three people with the extraordinary gift of being able to see in the future are used to prevent murders from happening... and the would-be murderers are convicted and imprisoned as if they had actually gone through with the murder. The end result is lives are saved by stopping the actual commission of murders, as well as the fact that the threat of the "pre-crime" police arresting you serves as a very effective deterrent against people planning to commit murder. In the world of this film, the "pre-cogs" that can see the future are never wrong, so that is never really what comes into question.

What does end up happening is someone uses the system against John Anderton (Tom Cruise) who pretty much runs the whole operation, and with the whole high tech crime prevention system looking for him, he's got to somehow prove his innocence and find out what really happens.

The overall premise of the film is quite interesting and raises a lot of moral and legal questions, but I do have to take issue with the execution of it. Apparently the future is going to be unnecessarily complex. For example, the film depicts this neat idea where cars travel up the sides of high rise apartment buildings like elevators and can actually dock right on the outside of your apartment so you don't have to go downstairs to get in your car, and also eliminating the need for large parking lots. That was neat.

Where things started getting unnecessarily complex was where some of the highways, rather than going AROUND buildings, would travel vertically up the side of a building, over the top, then vertically back down the other side of the building. Yes, it all looks terribly futuristic, and it also gives Tom Cruise the opportunity to play a live action version of Super Mario Bros. as he leaps from one car to the other while they are moving up and down this vertical highway... it just doesn't make sense. I can't see anyone actually thinking that this would be the best way to build a highway through that area... While I understand the desire to have a dramatic chase scene, I have to wonder if maybe this was Steven Spielberg's personal idea and nobody around him had the guts to say "um... Mr. Spielberg? Why would a highway go up and down the sides of buildings instead of going around them? That doesn't make any sense. We should figure out a different chase scene scenario."

I was also somewhat apprehensive about the length of the film -- I wasn't sure if I could handle 2 hours and 26 minutes of Tom Cruise playing action hero, but the plot did move sufficiently quick enough to keep my attention and really it didn't seem all that long in the end. So yeah. It's a pretty decent movie, despite some certain ridiculously complex visions of what the future is going to look like.

The DVD: The video transfer had somewhat lower resolution than I expected to see from such a recent big budget film, though it did have good shadow detail despite the blacks being crushed by the bleach bypass effect used throughout the film. There was also a decent amount of what I figured to be intentionally visible grain to add to the look fo the film, though it may have also just been a side effect of the "Super35" process used to shoot the film. The audio was also not as clean as I would have expected from such a recent big budget movie, despite having a DTS option for the soundtrack. It is however impossible for me to really say if these things were the result of a poor DVD transfer, or if it was like that in the original film... or maybe even both.

There are both pan and scan and full frame versions of the special edition of this film, so make sure you get the one you want. All of the special features are on the second disc which I did not receive from Netflix so I cannot comment on their content or quality, but I can say that there's probably a good deal of quantity since they did go through the trouble of putting it on a separate disc.

So in the end... you get a fairly effective suspense film set in a somewhat unrealistic vision of the future with certainly passable, but mostly unimpressive video and audio quality for such a recent film. Is it worth seeing? Well you probably won't regret seeing it, but I also wouldn't go through a huge effort to seek out this film either.