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minority report, information density, and the future of cinema
Yesterday I went to go see Minority Report, and I enjoyed it, although not without some reservations.
I found just about every escape that Tom Cruise pulls in the movie to be implausible, even by action-movie standards. (If you want details, check out the fake memo drafted by Jane over at Umami Tsunami (thanks, Judith)).
I also found that the film failed to put forth a coherent ideology about the future world it depicted. The film seems to almost function as a critique, but it always then seems to step back. The messages that the film communicates most strongly are "it's good for people to love one another," "it's good to love your children," and "killers are bad," none of which are especially provocative, and all of which are particularly, uh, Spielbergian. My concerns in this regard match up roughly with those put forth by the Chicago Reader's film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, in this lengthy, intelligent piece on the film.
Rosenbaum comments about the tendency of this film to cram the visual field with active details—he describes trying to concentrate on all the details as being akin to trying to concentrate on all three rings of a circus. This is something that this film shares in common with Attack of the Clones (which I also saw and enjoyed, although with a separate set of reservations), so I've been thinking a lot about the way that films are starting to do this. As an audience member, I share some of Rosenbaum's irritation—I hated the digital revamp of the initial three Star Wars movies, the way gags or gimmicks (or what Eisenstein would have called "attractions") were stuffed into spaces that formerly served as neutral background. (Rosenbaum traces this aesthetic back to Mad Magazine, which is interesting.)
But I wonder if these attractions are not being designed to appeal to people in the DVD / videotape market. These creators, notoriously forward-thinking, may be beginning to think about film not as something that unfolds in a temporal line but rather as something that can be broken into segments which can be independently accessed, frozen and inspected frame-by-frame if so desired. Think of the jokes in The Simpsons that go by faster than the eye can see. I would not be surprised if these were early peeks at the future of filmmaking.
I have to admit that the interfaces in Minority Report are a delight to look at. Alex Wright calls the film "interface porn" (and he also got his hands on Katherine Jones' original prototype sketches; thanks to BlackBeltJones for the link.)
Labels: information, media commentary, science_fiction |
Monday, July 01, 2002
1:14 PM
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