SOURCE: Kauffmann, Stanley. “Spielberg's Future.” New Republic 227, no. 4 (22 July 2002): 30-1.

In the following review, Kauffmann examines the strengths and weaknesses of Minority Report, commenting that, though the film is technically proficient, the script is “thematically slender.”

Science is frequently the lesser part of science fiction. Contemporary science is the launchpad for extrapolations, but the whole enterprise is usually wrought as a means to comment on society or politics or human nature or human destiny. H. G. Wells said that he wrote The Time Machine as a “fantasy based on the idea of the human species developing about divergent lines,” and when he discussed the novel with Theodore Roosevelt in the White House the president didn't talk about the devices of time travel, he concentrated on the Wellsian concept of future society. Examples proliferate: Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Clarke's Childhood's End, and Pohl-Kornbluth's The Space Merchants are only three more of...