Minority Report

Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film is set in the Washington of 2054, and that city was not improvised. In 1999 fifteen specialists met at a Santa Monica hotel for three days, among them architect Peter Calthorpe, novelist Douglas Coupland and computer scientist Jaron Lanier. Production designer Alex McDowell turned the output into a guide of roughly eighty pages, so the world was written down before it was built. John Underkoffler, who designed the interface Anderton conducts with his hands, says Spielberg asked for something like conducting an orchestra. Two points matter before you start. Janusz Kamiński used a bleach bypass process and colour drops by roughly forty percent, so the future here is a high contrast noir surface close to black and white rather than anything glossy. Second, the film inverts the outcome of the Philip K. Dick story: there Anderton prevents the unit from being shut down, here he brings it down, so a reader of the source leaves with the opposite verdict. The project was optioned in 1992 as a Total Recall follow up and went standalone after Carolco went bankrupt in 1995. Tom Cruise leads. Rewarding if you can wait while the rules of a world are laid down before the chase starts. Unrewarding if you want guilt tied off cleanly.