'Minority' Rules

Image credit: Minority Report: David James

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Minority Report

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What's the deal with that weird bald woman (Samantha Morton) who shows up in the trailers with Cruise -- is she his love interest?
No way. Morton, who made an Academy Award-nominated debut as Sean Penn's mute lover in Woody Allen's ''Sweet and Lowdown,'' plays Agatha, a genetically engineered psychic, known as a ''precog.'' Agatha's ability to see the future dooms her to live as a subhuman slave, permanently submerged in a sort of futuristic hot tub with two other precogs; they spend all their time predicting murders for the Pre-Crime unit.

Cruise says he was taken aback by the intensity of Morton's performance, which often led her to release an unearthly shriek. ''She was like lightning in a bottle,'' he says. ''She's got an amazing face.'' In fact, Spielberg and Cruise were so impressed that they exchanged a high-five after Morton's first take.

Agatha inadvertently causes a crisis for Cruise's Anderton. When she and her fellow precogs see visions in which he commits murder, he becomes a fugitive (hence the advertising slogan ''Everybody runs''). Stealing Agatha from the government in an effort to find an answer to his dilemma, Anderton acts more as a father figure than lover; his heart is with his ex-wife (Kathryn Morris) and his dead son.

For a movie about murders, how violent is ''Minority Report''?
This is the Steven Spielberg of ''Saving Private Ryan,'' not ''E.T.'' So, yeah, this is no kiddie flick. There's more than one gruesome murder, but it's done with Hitchcockian restraint -- you think you see more than Spielberg actually shows. Most of the really gory action -- a cuckolded husband unleashing a pair of scissors on his wife, for instance -- takes place in the precogs' visions, because the cops manage to stop the attacks before they actually occur.

What exactly are those mechanical spiders seen in the trailers?
Though they provide some striking visuals, the metallic crawlers are not that important to the plot, or even as scary as they look. The spiders are search devices; police dispatch them into buildings, where they track down all occupants by body heat and scan their eyes to identify possible fugitives. So why are they so prominent in the trailer? Maybe Spielberg figured that spiders are hot at the box office this summer.