My God, look what Ralph Nader’s done to the world!
Steven Spielberg’s diatribe against Ralph Nader, a far-flung vision of our dystopian, Al Gore-less future. The dire consequences of the 2000 Bush victory as dreamed into a paranoid future by a moderate liberal.
Dr. Prune, you hit the nail square on the head. The analysis obviously had an agenda. And I’m still not seeing the evidence Minority Report had anything to do with Nader.
The film seems more anti-Democrat than anti-Green Party. The whole idea of ‘Thought Police’ is indelibly connected to Democrats. Nader and his buddies are just tree-huggers.
So folks - what are the metaphorical aspects of the fact that the whole movie rests on two howlingly bad cliches of plot and storytelling?
1. The film is all about identity being available to every computer, from billboards to The Gap - but the police station where the Pre-crime lab is *doesn’t bother to remove Anderton’s identity from the door locks* so he can use his (now external) eyeballs to gain entry,
and of course,
2. How the whole plot is revealed by his mentor’s slip of the tongue about how the girl was drowned when he supposedly couldn’t have known that…
Does this support the Nader-future, the Gore-future or the Bush-future?
<grin>
Avoiding what the text has to say about the tangents of what politics could possibly take. Avoiding all the viewpoints of how the movie is presented and what the directors visual message is. How about looking at the main protagonist. Does anyone have any viewpoints about John Andertons dealing with ‘karma’… Isn’t the message of the film to actually tell us that an individual can determine their own course in life, regardless of what we are told we are going to do??
I found this analysis to be an excellent example of how to reach into a movie and pull from it whatever supports my viewpoint. Not really caring much about politics myself, I couldn’t care less who Spielberg is criticizing- just whether or not he is criticizing them. And in this movie… he isn’t. The article goes to great lengths to draw interpretations from the movie that are one of two things:
1) False- this isn’t what he is saying or
2) True, but poorly presented. Even if Spielberg is saying this, he isn’t doing it very well. I enjoy looking “deeper” into movies, especially ones that on the surface aren’t that deep, but this is simply a reaching, grappling interpretation that fits the parts of the movie that are convinient around the already agreed upon point. To the author: start with the movie, then move to your interpretation, not vice versa.