FC: Wired mag. on Steven Spielberg's forthcoming "Minority Report"

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Previous Politech message:

"More on 'Minority Report' photos and Philip K. Dick novella"
http://www.politechbot.com/p-02263.html

Politech irregular Wayne Madsen's stealth photos of Minority Report's set:
http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/minority-report-filming-june01.html

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http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/spielberg.html

   Spielberg in the Twilight Zone
   
   Adorable aliens and menacing dinos made him the biggest science
   fiction director of all time. With Minority Report he's finally
   turning to the dark side.
   
   By Lisa Kennedy
                                                                         
   Steven Spielberg, as even he will tell you, makes two kinds of movies.
   There are his films that play with the future, and there are those
   that star the past. On a warm afternoon in Pasadena, he's shuttling
   between the two - he's taking a break from shooting Catch Me If You
   Can, set in the mid-1960s, to talk about Minority Report, which opens
   June 21.
   
   Based on a short story by science fiction's tender, dystopian ironist
   Philip K. Dick, Report unfurls in a near future where murderers are
   caught before they do the deed. This breakthrough in crime fighting is
   powered by the revelations of psychically gifted humans called
   precogs. When the chief of the precrime unit is fingered as a future
   killer himself, he runs. For Spielberg, the film was an opportunity to
   create "a future that is not too distant, yet with the kind of
   technologies we can only dream about." Sitting at a picnic table,
   dressed in the directorial uniform - jeans, sweater, baseball cap -
   Spielberg mixes measured insights about technology with a cantering
   enthusiasm for his first noir.
   
   There is, however, anxiety wafting around the movie. Minority Report
   is pure Dick, rife with governmental malice and bodies of flesh wired
   into machines. So it's no surprise that Dick's fans are paranoid; it's
   practically a requirement. But the hand-wringing over Minority Report
   goes beyond the usual page-to-screen fretting. This is a
   Spielberg-specific worry. He can't do irony. He doesn't do darkness.
   Or when he does, he compulsively rescues the bleak truth with a bolt
   of hopefulness, with a touch of E.T.'s illuminated finger. He did that
   with the endings to Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan. He did
   that to A.I., which failed because he grafted a "Spielbergian"
   conclusion onto Stanley Kubrick's somber proceedings. Or so the
   argument goes.

   [...]



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