Minority Report Review
You only have to listen through John Williams' intensely spooky score a few times to realize that it is the emotional potency of film music in the Williams style that makes Tom Cruise and his colleagues on this Spielberg sci-fi flick seem as edgy as they do. The acting without the music would be another matter, good but not great, tense but not heartstopping.
Williams has proven himself over and over again to be the ranking genius of the trade. This relatively unsung soundtrack is simply another feather in his cap.
In signature style, the power of Williams' music kicks in--ironically--when he has finished a romp through the minefields of spook and then hits you with a lushly harmonic resolution (for example, track four). At moments like this, one is listening to very fine music independently of its connection to the movie.
This being Williams, however, he doesn't let you revel in *that*. No sooner are you starting to really enjoy the disinterested beauty of a track than he rips you back into a chase scene that makes you forget what tranquility felt like.
Creepy. Eery. Deeply emotional. Films wouldn't be films without John Williams. Someone would have to invent him.
Minority Report Overview
While Steven Spielberg's sci-fi detective thriller revolves around the intriguing premise of future cops arresting criminals before their crimes, beneath its high-tech veneer it asks a simple but infinitely powerful question: Do we have the power to alter our own destiny? Coming on the heels of the director's posthumous collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, it also affords longtime Spielberg musical collaborator John Williams a rare back-to-back opportunity to construct a musical future-world. The composer's efforts here are largely a forceful departure from A.I.'s sparkling minimalist influences, employing an enduring cinematic cliché--that film futures often sound much like the works of early-20th-century serialist/modernist classical composers--that puts a compelling new spin on the ever slippery concept of postmodernism. If the cues here occasionally recall the jagged edges, dark corners, and rhythmic fury of some of Goldsmith's best sci-fi scores, it's only a tribute to both legends' deep musical roots and preternatural scoring instincts. But make no mistake, this is pure Williams at his most compelling, employing his full arsenal of technique and always masterful use of color to construct a new genre--call it "future noir"--from inspirations as diverse as Bartók, Ligeti, Penderecki, Webern, and Schoenberg. Like Herrmann's suspenseful scores for Hitchcock (one of the film's intentional musical touchstones), there may be nary a memorable melody in it, but it's a riveting--and occasionally harrowing--listen from opening bars to its final, minimalist-tinged string flourishes. --Jerry McCulley
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