Spider Robots, from "Minority Report" (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg
The second of three Spielberg scenes I'll post, from perhaps his most visually arresting movie. In 2017, Andrew Liptak called Minority Report "the most special kind of futuristic fantasy: one that is more relevant, fresh, and terrifying today than it was when it arrived ..." The society it depicts seems even closer today, with most of the world locked down, talk of "immunity passports" to re-enter public life, and the tech giants underpinning "surveillance capitalism" more powerful and wealthy than ever. Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise, in one of his most resonant performances) is on the run from his own police force, which will prove to be the unwitting agents of a dark conspiracy against him. He's undergone backstreet surgery to replace his eyeballs (gross!) so he can pass through scans -- shades of the female militants in The Battle of Algiers dolling themselves up western-style to get through the French checkpoints. Now Anderton is recuperating in a hotel, but he's caught up in a neighbourhood sweep by his old comrades, who use a surreal tactic to case the building. To escape, he'll have to make his body-heat undetectable ... The "thermo-reading, retina-scanning, creepy-crawling robotic spiders" (David Dupre, see below) activate all our primal fears of arachnids, while Cruise's temporary blindness constitutes "a physical limitation that creates its own layer of anxiety." Spielberg constructs the scene with astonishing visual verve, his camera roving and swooping through the building, with little vignettes of urban life routinely interrupted, en route to the Cruise-and-crawlers climax.
FREEZE FRAME: Spiders on the Hunt in "Minority Report"
Article:
Minority Report holds up because it's about surveillance, not gadgets
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