Minority Report

The rest of the day was given over to wandering from eatery to eatery, which tends to form the substantive bulk of my social activity over here, simply because most eateries are air-conditioned enough for conversation to be about something other than how hot we all are. From gourmet sandwiches at Olio Dome to char kuay teow at Kopitiam to cakes at Cafe Cartel to bubble tea and salty chicken at Quickly to meatball soup at the Marina Square food court in various group compositions (Me, Felice, Ken, for a spell, Jonathan, eventually just me and Ken). Conversational highlights of the afternoon included Ken calling me a slut (highly amusing if you know Ken) and the Who Would I Shag In This Shopping Centre? game. Also brief forays into schools of legal and political thought, but that doesn’t sell papers, dah-ling.

Minority Report thankfully managed to exorcise me of my A.I. demons, in that it was a sci-fi movie with a lot more brain and subtlety, and a lot less saccharine cringeworthiness, although I still had to roll my eyes at the ending sequences.

But because I can never resist the urge to nitpick: they set up the loss of Anderton’s son as the driving force behind his belief in pre-crime (the why, so crucial in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I’m enjoying immensely these days). Multiple statements are made about how pre-crime could have saved his son if it had only been set up 6 months earlier. But it can only detect murders, not rapes, not assaults, presumably not abductions, and his interrogation of Leo Crow later reveals that he doesn’t actually know if his son is still alive or dead. So pre-crime would have been useless if his son had merely been abducted and, say, ritually tortured. Also, the law student in me wonders how the system draws what can often be an exceedingly hazy line between murder and manslaughter, given that they seem to have dispensed with all relevance of actus reus (the act) and mens rea (the state of mind) as elements of a crime.

But I admit these are easy and not particularly penetrating criticisms to make, and they don’t detract from the fact that it’s a stunningly-made film with fairly good adherence to continuity (this is important to me. Other disgruntled X-Philes will understand) which didn’t bore me for a second – overall, well worth my seven fifty, which I don’t find myself able to say about most films I see.

Especially since I am about to leave the house to watch The Eye with Ken, a movie we are inexplicably determined to see despite everyone else giving us dire warnings to the contrary. We only settled for Minority Report yesterday because The Eye wasn’t showing where we were, and only after a long tussle between the pros and cons of travelling to Tampines to watch The Eye (pro: we’d watch The Eye; con: we’d watch The Eye).