Forgive me if this topic’s been covered, but I couldn’t find it.
I love movies and I love critiques of movies.
I also understand the urge to slam someone who’s very successful.
But I don’t understand why Spielberg got slammed for the Minority Report ending.
I just saw it for the first time, on DVD, after having read all the reviews last summer about it. I was influenced by those reviews and was waiting for some candy-ass, Disney-type ending that is usually associated with Spielberg.
I’m sorry, I don’t see what they’re talking about. All I saw was a crime-noir ending to a crime-noir movie.
It was the same with AI. That ending was slammed, too. But the ending was just the sort of ‘out-there’ drawn-out stuff Kubrick would’ve done.
Everyone slammed Spielberg for it.
Would they have slammed Kubrick?
With Minority Report, you’ve got at least two potentially troublesome endings. The first starts with everything after Tom Cruise is put in prison. The movie could end there, Our Hero tragically overtaken by his pre-ordained fate. If you can swallow the sequence after that, you’ve got the final few seconds to deal with, when the voiceover reveals that, despite its 99.99% success rate, PreCrime is abandoned. Too easy, too quick.
Likewise, the problem with A.I. is that it had several other places where it could have ended, but pushed it into absurdity. Hell, I’d have a problem with the “clone her from a thousand-year old strand of hair, revive her memories from ‘cosmic vibrations,’ but only for one day” concept even if it wasn’t the ending.
FWIW, I also didn’t like the ending to Saving Private Ryan – the bookend sequences, anyway. But maybe that’s another debate.
However, I remember being blown away by the ending to The Lost World, because I foolishly assumed that the movie ended when they left the island. I was ready to go home, but the movie kept going. This time, they saved the best for last.
Schindler’s List also had a sappy ending spoiling an otherwise good film.
Minority Report didn’t have a film-noir ending. If you want film-noir see Double Indemnity, Chinatown or Maltese Falcon. MR was a sappy, feel-good ending which is almost the opposite of what film-noir is about.
I thought the ending of Minority Report was too predictable. The trusted mentor who is revealed as the villain at the end. Such cliche. I saw it coming long before the end and thought to myself, “Please let them do something more original than that!” But they didn’t. Kinda ruined the movie for me, even though I had enjoyed everything else about it. The happy “Disney” aspects of the ending didn’t bother me much, I just wish they had taken a different route to get there.
I have three main problems with Spielberg, even though I do enjoy his films for the most part.[ul][li]The sappy feel-good ending CyberPundit describes. Not all of his films have it, but many would have been better without. “Saving Private Ryan” is the worst example, for the reason I’m coming on to:[/li][li]Treating the audience as idiots. Spot the obvious villain? Quick plot rehash in the middle of a film? Heavy-handed morality? The bookends to “SPR” were prime examples of Spielberg telling the audience what to think rather than letting them work it out for themselves. I felt slightly insulted in hindsight.[/li]Overuse of music to emphasise the above. A more minor quibble, I suppose.[/ul]
I should add that there is a theory out there, which I am half-sympathetic to, that MR has a trick ending and that it represents Anderton’s daydream after he is put away. That would make a much better ending and there are a couple of hints pointing that way. However there has been no indication from Spielberg that he intended this so I suppose you have to take the ending literally. Even if a trick ending was intended it was rather too subtle.
I thought the ending to MR was fine, and really just what you’d expect from a Hollywood blockbuster. Of course, I’m biased, as it was filmed on the balcony of my building. All in all I thought it was a pretty good movie.
The ending for A.I. was fantastic, just fantastic, and completely justified the entire film up to that point. It pretended to be happy and gay while actually being one of the most dystopian views of humanity I’ve ever seen on film.
I’ll have to agree with most of what’s been said about MR. I never thought of it in those ways-- but hey, I just saw it yesterday.
However, AI’s ending satisfied me. I thought it was exactly what Kubrick would’ve done. I’ve read that he had a lot of trouble trying to find an ending to AI when he was preparing it, and he and Spielberg talked a lot about that.
The only part of AI that I didn’t like was the Dr. Know sequence, which definitely was too ‘Disney’.
A.I. was crap practically from the get-go. The ending was bad icing on an already ruined cake. It was ludicrous:
Alien: We will do whatever we can to make you happy.
Kid: Bring my mom back.
Alien: Well… we would, but we don’t have a sample of her DNA…shucks.
Teddy Bear: How about this hair?
Alien: Well… we can bring her back, but only for a day.
I laughed my ass off at what I seriously doubt was supposed to be a funny ending.
Minority Report would have been a far, far more powerful movie if Anderton hadn’t been able to avoid his fate. The last 20 minutes were so tacked on and ridiculous that it was almost like watching a different movie.
Also, part of the problem with Minority Report is that the ending is quite different than that of the story on which it is based.
In the story, the precogs say Anderton will commit a murder just as in the movie. However, the “minority report” from the title is his. He finds out that the first precog said he would commit the murder, the second said he would not. The third precog said he would commit the murder after he realizes that if he doesn’t then the validity of Pre-Crime would be destroyed. (He supported Pre-Crime, just as the character in the movie did, and would not want to see it destroyed.) He commits the murder then kills himself.
However, in MR you had the unsolved crime of the pre-cog mother, or whoever the red-haired lady was. If it ended with Anderton in prison, then that thread would’ve been dropped without closure.
I’m in agreement with Cliffy that the ending to A.I. is actually deeply cynical and disturbing while dressed up in feel-good clothes. I advanced that interpretation in some detail in at least one thread here when the movie was released.
Regarding the hypothesis mentioned by CyberPundit, that the end of Minority Report is all a fantasy in Anderton’s mind, I think the movie was deliberately designed with that intent. It doesn’t come down on one side or the other (as I think it’s possible to untangle A.I. from clues in the film), and remains deliberately ambiguous, but not in a good way.
As far as the very ending of the film, there was going to be a title card epilogue over the aerial shot of the islands where the pre-cogs found refuge. Spielberg wrestled with the question of including it or not until, as I understand it, he was right on the deadline of when he had to have the film locked down and sent to the lab for print distribution. At the last second, he decided to leave it out.
The text of the title card was something like this: “The following year, there were 146 murders in Washington D.C.”
In other words, it deflates the “happy” ending, reminding the audience that there’s a tradeoff for liberty. We can have the pre-cog system, which effectively eliminates murder even though it occasionally condemns an otherwise innocent man due to an obscure causal loop, or we can have personal freedom, which means we have to live with other people’s freedom to kill us.
In my opinion, it says everything about Spielberg’s intentions as a filmmaker (and, perhaps, philosophy as a human being) that he chose to eliminate that closing title.
Personally, I regard Minority Report as two-thirds of a great movie.