'Minority Report' React: Cool Tech, But About Those Pigeons...
Confronted with the two diverging roads that face any movie-based TV series — one road leading to a reboot and the other a continuation — the makers of Minority Report chose the road less traveled by (the continuation), and that makes some of the difference. Adapted from the 2002 blockbuster, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise, the television version of Minority Report jumps 11 years ahead in the futuristic timeline established by the feature film, which, as you may recall, involved Cruise’s cop hero preventing crimes before they occur courtesy of some next-gen technology… at least until he becomes a prime suspect in a murder that hasn’t happened yet.
Related: ‘Minority Report’ Primer: How the 2002 Film Sets Up Fox’s New Series
It goes without saying that Cruise wasn’t anywhere to be found in Tuesday’s series premiere, but the ramifications of the movie’s story are still felt amongst the characters that do return. Those would be the precogs, the trio of psychically inclined individuals whose minds conjured up the murderous visions that the since-dismantled PreCrime force used to solve murders in advance. Last glimpsed living in isolation on a remote island, the precogs have since made their way back into the wider world. Our hero, Dash (Stark Sands), for example, is hanging around Washington D.C., trying to find a way to deal with the gruesome images that periodically invade his mind. Deprived of his fellow siblings’ psychic prowess as well as the technology that allowed him to visualize these visions in three dimensions, Dash is reduced to sketching fragments of them in a notebook and then watching helplessly as the crimes play out in real life.
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After witnessing one death too many, the precog makes the bold, potentially foolhardy step of entrusting his talents to top cop, Lara Vega (Meagan Good), who got into policework with the intention of working in PreCrime, only to see that division shut down after Cruise exposed its flaws for the world to see. Thanks to Dash’s visions, the duo stumbles upon an assassination plot directed at a prominent politician with a controversial plan to keep the public safe. The method of attack? Pigeons. Not the futuristic robotic kind you might expect: actual flesh-and-feather pigeons. The assassination is foiled and a new crime-fighting team is born.
What We Liked: Cruise may have been the star of Spielberg’s movie, but the precogs — particularly Angela (played in the film by Samantha Morton and here by Laura Regan) — were by far the most compelling characters. Showrunner Max Borenstein clearly agrees, because the series largely unfolds from their perspective, Dash’s first and foremost obviously, but Agatha and the remaining precog, Arthur (Nick Zano, in a role that Sands was originally going to play in addition to Dash) will almost certainly become key players as the series moves forward. Sands may be an unlikely screen presence to build a series around, but he holds his own nicely in the premiere, hinting at some of the mental trauma that made Morton’s performance in the movie so affecting. But even more compelling than Dash is the world that the series takes place in; Spielberg’s film was also distinguished by a vision of the future that felt like a logical extension of the present, and Minority Report strives for that futuristic realism as well, achieving it more often than not. The scene early in the premiere where Vega reconstructed a recently committed murder via a series of holographic tools and techniques was a standout bit of futuristic crime-solving.
What Didn’t Work: Good seems more comfortable acting with technology than she is with her human co-star. The writers are clearly going for a Sleepy Hollow dynamic between her steely cop and Sands’s fish out of water crime fighter, but this duo lacks the immediate chemistry of Tom Mison and Nicole Beharie. In fact, most of the procedural stuff is pretty blah, which is a problem if the series intends to be more of a case of the week affair than a serialized narrative. (One could also make the case that having Vega use Dash to solve crimes every week defeats the primary point of the movie: that PreCrime is a deeply flawed system that sets a dangerous precedent. Perhaps they should fail in their missions once or twice in order to preserve that thematic idea.) It doesn’t help that Good’s fellow cops — Wilmer Valderrama among them — have little to no personality. And need we remind you about that whole pigeon thing? It’s more than a little ludicrous that the premiere’s big climatic moment involved the characters bringing down a flock of winged rats.
Our Burning Questions: Obviously, the main question on everyone’s mind is…when’s Tom Cruise showing up? Once upon a time the answer would have been a firm, “Never,” but the fact that Bradley Cooper will occasionally be dropping by Limitless, the CBS procedural based on his 2011 hit, changes the equation — as does the parade of A-list performers dropping by Empire this season. The fact that Spielberg is an executive producer on the series gives the producers a direct line to Cruise. Keep an eye on those ratings — if the series manages to make it to May, “The Return of Anderton” would certainly be a great two-part finale.
Minority Report airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on Fox.