Otherwise-sane people keep saying that they liked Minority Report, so I feel compelled to make a list of the reasons I hated it. There are spoilers here, so I'll <lj-cut> it, even though my day was spoiled by this movie.

<lj-cut text="...rant on...">

First, the things about it that I thought were ok:

• The notion of a heavily-observed society, where everyone is monitored every time they go out in public (and sometimes private) was interesting, and there were some cool (and creepy) ideas attached to that, like personalized billboards and the talking cereal box.

• I liked the character of the doctor in the greenhouse. She was the only interesting character, for all of the two minutes she was in the movie.

• The cars were kind of neat.

What I hated:

• How many times did they have to wave in our face that the cars were LEXUS?

• The chase scene happening to end in the LEXUS factory was really stupid. How easy do you think it would be to wander in to an operating factory, in the downtown of a major city? It seems to happen all the time in Hollywood!

• They have retina scanners everywhere, but the unprotected conveyor belt doesn't have any motion sensors to shut down when there's something in the way that shouldn't be?

• Wait, did I say "chase sequence on a conveyor belt"? Yes, I did. Wasn't I told that this was a serious exploration of privacy and determinism, and suddenly we're in a Tom and Jerry cartoon?

• They assemble the car around him (I am so sure), and then just drop the car off at the exit of the factory, ready to drive away? Rather than automatically stacking the cars into a shipping container? Did they assemble every car around its own driver, because they all seem to have driven away by the time he exits the amusement park ride, excuse me, the factory. Please keep your hands inside the LEXUS until it is fully assembled, exit to your right.

• Plucked eyeballs bounce. Not only do they bounce, they round corners and roll really well, despite the sticky goo and inch long piece of optic nerve sticking out the back. Sorry, did I say Tom and Jerry earlier? I meant Itchy and Scratchy.

  That scene would have seemed hackneyed and forced even in a crap-fest like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. (I loved the other Indy movies, but that one sucked and you know it.)

• The rotting sandwich gag was just stupid, insulting, unbelievable, and completely out of place. Does having your eyes removed also remove your sense of smell, and sense of touch from your fingers?

  It's as if you were watching North by Northwest and suddenly there was a guest appearance by the Three Stooges. You know, just to "lighten things up."

• What was with the wooden balls, besides being a clumsy "lottery" gag?

• Let me get this straight: they've got a society that retina scans you every time you enter a public building, even a store. Their network is to tightly centralized that the cops have the ability, on a moment's notice, to have these millions of cameras report back when they see a particular suspect. AND YET, they can't tell the system to, I don't know, stop opening doors for this person? Let him into an elevator but don't let him out?

• Nobody, not even homicide cops, are lowjacked?

• Even with all this central control, it never occurred to them, in all the years this system has existed, that it might be a good idea to cancel the security clearance of someone wanted for murder, instead of letting him walk into what appears to be the most tightly controlled room in the whole city? Dude: change the fucking locks.

• And even though they have retina scanning down cold, we're to believe that it's still possible to sanitize a gun by giving it a quick wipe with a hanky. Because, you know, they wouldn't have any kind of DNA-profiling ability that could sniff out stray flecks of skin. That would be like science fiction or something.

• We are then told that, off-camera, the killer managed to move the body and make it appear that the murder had taken place elsewhere. This would of course be easy, because, as the second murder that took place in the city in nine years, they're just not going to be paying very close attention to the crime scene. Surely they won't bother to notice notice any trivial details like, say, the puddle of blood being missing.

  (In case you missed that idiotic moment in the movie -- they glossed over it really quickly -- just after Max von Sydow shoots the Fed in Sydow's office, someone exposits that Cruise just killed the Fed in his home.)

• Cruise's ex-wife left him, and (we are told) moved out of their apartment in the city to a house in the country to get away from the memory of their dead son. And yet, she decorates a whole room in that house with her dead son's things, even to the extent of having a rusty tricycle sitting on the lawn outside.

• And, as the capping insult, we are expected to believe that after these apparently-mostly-autistic psychics, who have spent at least the last (what did they say?) nine years of their lives, and very likely their entire lives before that, living on their backs in a vat of milk watching people die, really all they needed to live happily ever after was to sip herbal tea in a cottage in the woods? Oh, was it herbal tea? Or was it a commercial for General Foods International Coffees?

Everything that was good about Minority Report -- which was the approximately ten minutes of the movie they (obliquely) devoted to the details about how invasive the government was -- was handled better in Gattaca.

Everything else about Minority Report was complete crap, and Spielberg is a pandering, ham-handed clod.