Production Design Review # 1 (Part 1) - MINORITY REPORT (2002)

Every decade in cinema history has its own technological high peaks, and every few years people get the feeling that everything's possible on the big screen. One of the first epic steps must have been the first movie feature with sound. 

I can just imagine what an incredible new mind-opening experience that must have been. After that, and many other smaller progresses, the power of colours conquered the theaters, Judy Garland was able to walk on the famous yellow path, entering the Wizard of Oz' emerald coloured castle. Clark Gable and Vivianne Leigh were starring under the deep red sky during the american civil war in Gone with the Wind, another entirely new world and epic drama as well opened its gates.

At the same time, the range and versatility of special effects also evolved,  bringing a (yet) unexplainable magic to the people's cinematic experiences. Various tricks in editing, lighting, sometimes comparable to "real life" - magical tricks, were used in the very young film industry since the beginning of motion pictures at all. Just remember the legendary George Mélies (recently portrayed by Ben Kingsley in Martin Scorsese's Hugo) who was a true pioneer in film history and its world of special effects.

Many decades passed and Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg or James Cameron (and of course a lot of others) set new standards in filmmaking, its technology and special effects. 

Kubrick always tried to push the boundaries of cinematic experience and perception, technically and philosophically. Designing his own "conditio humana", setting the viewer's eyes on new horizons, inside the characters and also into outer space, as seen in 2001-A Space Odyssey. 

James Cameron is basically a technical visionary. Somehow he's a master of cinematic action and action-dramas. Movement, dynamics, speed and emotional storylines are always some sort of main characters in his movies. Altough he created such iconic (human or human-like) characters like the Terminator, the Titanic lovers Jack and Rose, and the natives of Pandora, the Na'vi, his movies always look like highly sophisticated constructions of action-scenarios.
Steven Spielberg is, in my opinion, a genuine "producer of dreams" in filmmaking. And his works include everything what dreams are about - they're deeply emotional, they touch our souls, they scare us, let us feel the warmth and coldness inside us or on the screen, and they contain a lot of psychological and "physical" movement that seems impossible in real life, but nevertheless plausible in our dreams. A lot of Spielberg's movies are about children and childhood memories that are essential for the storys and the characters. And at the same time he is also an extremely innovative technical pioneer, similar to Cameron, Kubrick, or, for example, Peter Jackson.

In this post, I'm gonna write about Minority Report (2002), Spielberg's fourth film which is set in the science-fiction genre and leads us into a fascinating futuristic world, based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, for one more time.
I chose this one because all these aspects of action driven, emotional and extremely technologic design based cinema are included and I highly appreciate the way Spielberg created this (yesterday's ) future ...

 

The film takes place in Washington D.C., in 2054.

A new police department called "PreCrime" has been built to track down and arrest people who are about commiting murder in the near future. 

The heart of this phenomenal new method in chasing criminals are three young telephatic individuals called "Precogs", two men and a woman, who are able to see fragments of future events, especially violent acts and killings. The cops of PreCrime use a highly sophisticated technology to extract the important parts of these Precog "visions" and try to prevent every murder in the state of Washington before they happen. They've been very successful since six years and one of the most dedicated policemen in this new department is Chief John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise).

Anderton once lost his little son Sean, probably kidnapped or murdered, and he and his wife Lara got seperated shortly afterwards. They never knew what happened to Sean and since then, John is obsessed with chasing murderers with PreCrime. In private, he got addicted to drugs and dreams about the happier days with his son and wife.

One day, a Precog foresees a murder, and it looks like John is the perpetrator himself. Now, Anderton gets chased by PreCrime and tries to prove his innocence desperately. Therefore his must use his knowledge as a cop and find a way through a jungle of a high-tech future world and its darkest corners and characters.

 

In my next post, I'll focus on several aspects of the movie's production design.

To be continued ;-)