Nothing will come of nothing

A few days ago I re-watched Minority Report for the first time since I saw it at the cinema on release, and enjoyed it far more than I expected. The virtual touchscreen imagery has only become more compelling thanks to smartphone touchscreens (I'm assuming the Kinect controls for Sky Player on Xbox 360 will come with fingerless cyber-gloves and tortured memories of lost children) and I loved the icy visual look, the relentless plotting, and the fact that it's sci-fi done very well, which is pretty rare.

The viewing also reminded me of something else I'd thought at the time, having then recently read Truffaut's Hitchcock book, a series of interviews with Hitchcock conducted by the French director. My favourite part has always been when Hitchcock describes a scene he thought up for North By Northwest.

It occurred to me that we were moving in a northwesterly direction from New York, and one of the stops on the way was Detroit, where they make Ford automobiles. Have you ever seen an assembly line? They're absolutely fantastic. Anyway, I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the assembly line. They might, for instance, be talking about one of the foremen. Behind them a car is being assembled, piece by piece. Finally, the car they've seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, and all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at it and say, "Isn't it wonderful?!" Then they open the door to the car and out drops a corpse!

Truffaut loves the idea, and calls it "a perfect example of nothing", but Hitchcock couldn't fit it into the film. But there's a scene in Minority Report which recalls the idea in a pretty direct if inverse way.



It's still about impossibility, of course, but featuring Tom Cruise it's about a different kind - it's about stars and presence, rather than suspense and absence.

Was it deliberate? I hope so. There was another discussion about Hitchcock's influence on Spielberg recently, with Dreamworks sued over the similarities between 2007's Disturbia and the short story behind Rear Window. Hitch would probably have given him this one for free.

Ice and Spielberg

Tomorrow morning I'm going to go out early and buy a sledge from town for my kids. There's a park with a hill still full of snow just 10 minutes away and it's obscene I haven't bought one already. It snowed a little tonight and it's still freezing, so hopefully they'll still have decent sledging conditions.

The continued iciness combines with the Spielberg On Spielberg interview in ITV4 right now to prod this post into being. I like Spielberg a lot. Most people who don't are idiots or babies. But I've always thought that AI and Minority Report were lost opportunities - both engaging and brilliantly realised sci-fi worlds which collapse under the weight of second-chance sentimentality right at the close.

Both films come to natural if unexpected ends with their central characters defeated and literally frozen. Haley Joel Osment's super-creepy super toy is trapped at the bottom of the now solid ocean staring in to the dead eyes of a blue fairy statue, and Tom Cruise's breathless, emotionally bruised future cop has been betrayed and put in a fridge prison by the brilliant Max von Sydow. Both of these characters are haunted and damaged, desperately searching for something to fix or complete them - a lost child, a lost mother. Their apparent failure is shocking - achingly, poignantly so in the case of AI, and ironically, satisfyingly so in Minority Report.

And then both films are ruined as the stalled narratives are jumpstarted and putter along to happy, forced conclusions. Aliens rescue the robot kid. Tommy breaks out and fixes everything. What a pair of refreshing and effective films we'd have if they'd ended in ice and darkness. Shame. Watch the end of AI below to see what I mean - the voiceover, the slow reverse zoom - it's perfect. And then it keeps bloody going.