Word: anderton
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...draw similarities between the actor and John Anderton, his complex, haunted character in Minority Report, is irresistible. In Spielberg's sci-fi mystery, Cruise stars as a seemingly stalwart cop in 2054 who heads an elite squad known as Precrime. Using a trio of psychic mutants called precogs, he can detect a murder before it happens, strap on a jet pack, then arrest the would-be perpetrator. But Anderton leads a double life, scoring a drug called neuroin in dark alleys, seeking oblivion after the unraveling of his family. Based on a 1956 short story by Philip K. Dick...
Cruise not only brought the story to Spielberg but also tapped into his most harrowing fears as a parent. The father of an adopted son, 7, and daughter, 9, Cruise said Anderton should have a son who was missing. "Tom came up with that to give the character complicated emotional baggage," says Spielberg, who confesses that he "had much more of a popcorn movie in mind until I began to think about the ramifications of arresting people without due process." The director says it was his friend Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian, who alerted him to the constitutional problems...
...Minority Report--Spielberg's sharpest, brawniest, most bustling entertainment since Raiders of the Lost Ark and the finest of the season's action epics--is its mix of future and retro. Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow), who might be a more benign John Ashcroft, and his protege John Anderton (Tom Cruise) run a system that prevents murders by arresting people before they commit them. Yet the Precrime apparatus is so goofily anach-ronistic--three young mind readers floating in a tank and billiard balls rolling through plastic tubes--that your brilliant, mad old uncle could have concocted...
Last time out, Spielberg tried humanizing Kubrick. This time (working from a Philip K. Dick story and an excellent script by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen), he borrows Hitchcock's Catholic belief that we are not all criminals, but we are all guilty; our humanity is our original sin. Anderton--on the run for a murder he hasn't thought of committing of a man he doesn't know--is oppressed by guilt because his young son was kidnapped while they were at a public swimming pool. Indeed, water, as both symbol and character, is everywhere in this film...
...Before it was a tight fit to get through there," Anderton said...