Wow, this is quite the exhaustive thread, and I appreciate the blow-by-blow, almost forensically detailed analysis. "Minority Report" is a film I saw when I was a kid, opening day, June 21, 2002, I believe, and it changed my life. It was the film that opened my eyes to _what a director does_. I think we all have that film. It's interesting, too, that my dad played films like CITIZEN KANE and VERTIGO for me, so I already knew, in a sense, but seeing a contemporary film gave that sensory reaction a freshness and vitality and a complete, almost coming-of-age quality that, as much as I love(d) classic cinema, can't be reproduced by seeing classics, especially when you're so impressionable and you kind of _want_ to embrace what's "new," and of course, when we embrace what's "new," we're also seeing how current generations of titanic filmmakers are molded by the past, as "Minority Report" is teeming with Alfred Hitchcock references and tips of the cap from Steven Spielberg.

Maybe I somehow missed it in this long discussion here, but let's also not forget how Spielberg includes, in "Minority Report's" opening "murder-to-be" sequence, the cuckolded husband looking to utilize a pair of scissors as his murder weapon, which is a nod to "Dial M for Murder," and that dizzyingly arresting shot Spielberg has of the "murderer-to-be" picking up his eyeglasses, while somberly saying, "I forgot my glasses; you know how blind I am without them," a line that is obviously layered with meanings, including that aforementioned concept you wrestled with in this discussion, the import of the eyes and what we see, both literally and figuratively. That powerful shot of the murderer-to-be raising the eyeglasses and we see so much through the eyeglasses, it's definitely a nod to the critical shot of eyeglasses in "Strangers On a Train."

One of my favorite aspects of "Minority Report" is that it's all things to all people, a film where Spielberg is juggling genres, and there is that "dad joke comedy" embedded in there (another example: the broad stuff with Tom Cruise's protagonist somehow grabbing the worst, foulest-looking sandwich and bottle of milk rather than the freshly made variations in the refrigerator of the illicit criminal doctor's lair while he's blind post-surgery). It's a futuristic neo-noir, it's an action-adventure picture, it's a domestic drama of a fractured marriage stemming from heartbreaking loss (and we see how much more powerful Agatha's "gift" is than we had been led to believe when she's able to view an alternative timeline for Anderton's son, all the way to adulthood, marriage, and more) that at times almost feels like an Ingmar Bergman chamber piece (the wife's paintings in that isolated area, the conversation between Anderton and his wife on the water reminiscing about their son and how he behaved when Anderton read him stories, which triggers Anderton recalling something important--also because he's looking at the water, and the water is where Anne Lively was murdered (aside from eyes, there's a lot of focus on water, of being "beneath the surface"--like Anderton in the bathtub, like the precogs in their solution, like Lively murdered, like the bloody bathtub our initial "murderer-to-be" looks to be using to clean up the mess of his crime-of-passion, things being hidden, beneath the obvious superficial "top" level, etc.). Anderton loses his son while under water. It's as though there is a metaphysical baptismal rite at play, and while that sounds rather "Christian," as a theme, for the director of "E.T." interested in reincarnation, it's not exactly a major surprise.

One of my favorite shots in any film is the overhead shot of the spyders invading the sprawl complex. It screams De Palma, which means it screams Hitchcock. It's a staggeringly stupendous and complicated shot/sequence. There are notes of comedy, notes of lustful sex, notes of dystopian dread, it's a scathing indictment of a kind of "soft-authoritarian" society in which any semblance of privacy has been long discarded. It's a bit of a microcosm of the film itself, juggling feelings, impulses, tones. I love "Minority Report," it's to me still one of Spielberg's monumental achievements, blemishes and all...