Just watched this. It may be the most insultingly badly-plotted blockbuster movie of all time.

"Oh no! The infallible precogs have said that I'm about to commit a murder in 36 hours. Hmm. What about if I voluntarily shut myself in a cupboard for the next 37 hours, clearly and unambiguously proving myself innocent? Or at least don't go to the place where the murder is supposed to happen? Or at least walk into the room where I supposedly shoot someone, but cleverly DON'T TAKE MY LOADED GUN IN THERE WITH ME LIKE SOME KIND OF IMPOSSIBLY BONEHEADED FUCKING MORON? For example."

The End. One man pays the price for a crime that he did (which ultimately saved thousands of lives), his price-paying bringing no benefit to the victim who remains stubbornly dead.

And, oh, we quietly won't mention the fact that without the precrime system, presumably people started being murdered by the thousand again the next day, especially since we say that all the jailed would-have-been murderers, (including the evil ones who would have been doing it premeditatedly as well as the in-the-heat-of-the-moment killers), have been pardoned and released. That'll send the punters home with a smile.

(The idea presumably being that we're supposedly rightly outraged at some innocent people being sent to jail for a while (even though that "jail" actually sounds rather pleasant and we're given no reason to believe otherwise). Except that we've been explicitly told that in cases where there's a "minority report", it's always the same precog who has the "true" version, so avoiding miscarriages of justice in fact couldn't be simpler. Conflict of visions? Agatha's is the right one, jail or don't jail the perpetrator accordingly, no miscarriages and nobody gets murdered. The tacked-on justification about (one of) the precogs being (a bit) unhappy is right up there with Greedo shooting (and missing from two feet) at Han Solo first in the cantina.)

(Oh, and we're shown that "protection" is a mad race against the clock to correctly identify and reach a murder location from a few visual snippets with only a few minutes' warning, and indeed the first one we see succeeds by just half a second or so, yet we're invited to believe that in SIX YEARS the Thought Police have never even once failed to solve the puzzle before murders happened, despite the fact that Chief Of Police Tom is mad as a squirrel and doped to the eyeballs.)

Oh, and speaking of eyeballs, what the flip's going on with the optician?

"Ah-ha! I, the grimy backstreet optician, have you, Tom Cruise, in my surgery. You don't remember me, but you sent me to prison where I was repeatedly and violently bummed in the showers by Mr Big, and now have to practice in this filthy hovel rather than my previous life as a glamourous and rich plastic surgeon. I have sneakily injected you with anaesthetic drugs when you weren't looking, and you are now incapable of escape. I will now sit you down in this chair, attach hideous machinery to your face, cackle evilly, and, er, FAITHFULLY AND PROFESSIONALLY PERFORM THE OPERATION YOU CAME HERE FOR, restricting my revenge to leaving you a rather smelly sandwich and some slightly-off milk." (It can't even be that off, since it's visibly still liquid rather than lumpy and gloopy like really rancid stuff.)

Oh, and what happened to the much-vaunted lengthy bout of excruciating, disabling pain that was supposed to follow the droopy-face injection? And what was that whole ridiculous "convenient escape hatch in the precog pool" stuff about?

Oh, and the bit where Tom has been EXPLICITLY TOLD NOT TO REMOVE HIS EYE BANDAGES OR HE WILL GO BLIND, but cleverly removes just one in desperation to fool the spiderbots, but then suffers no apparent ill-effects whatsoever for the rest of the movie from having one of his eyes burned out.

Oh, and the eye-scanners will diligently detect even a tiny bit of scar tissue left behind by an iris replacement, but apparently WON'T notice the fact that the eye being scanned is in fact DRIPPING GOOP, NO LONGER ATTACHED TO ITS OWNER AND BEING HELD IN SOMEONE'S HAND?

Oh, and this future society allows the law to lock people up for crimes that haven't happened without a trial or a defence, but apparently doesn't allow the state to simply refuse child custody to a reformed junkie?

And and and and and and and.

Unbelievably dreadful in every imaginable and measurable way, right down to the "Phew, it's okay, she's pregnant again!" ending. How on Earth did Spielberg escape brutal murder for this atrocity of crapness?