Spielberg: Big Brother's Already Watching
June 20 -- With a new movie coming out, another Indiana Jones sequel in the works and a confirmed reputation as Hollywood's most bankable director, you'd think Steven Spielberg would be pretty excited about the future.
Actually, he's a little worried.
In directing his new thriller, Minority Report, Spielberg has had a lot of time to contemplate where mankind is headed, and he's come to the conclusion that the loss of privacy to the peering eye of law enforcement is inevitable.
In the new movie, Tom Cruise plays a police officer in a futuristic Washington, D.C. He leads a "pre-crime" unit that employs infallible psychics and surveillance technology to arrest killers before they commit crimes.
Danger for Nerds With a Funny Walk
That may seem like farfetched science fiction, but Spielberg is not so certain. He's worried that America's war on terrorism has set in motion new high-tech methods to try to find criminals before they can carry out their crimes.
"They have a computer program that they're developing that's going to try to predict human behavior and be able to spot terrorism in airports," the filmmaker says.
"What they're looking for is anomalies in behavior. It's sort of a mean average of how people behave when they're simply walking down the street and they're going to compare that to people whose behavior is more erratic," he says.
And that makes the Oscar-winning director distinctly uneasy.
"What really disturbs me — a nerd who does have a weird walk — is that I imagine that suddenly a van pulls up and hauls me into an interrogation, you know, for being original … or for being different."
Cruise: ‘It Is a Dilemma’
Minority Report, which opens nationwide on Friday, paints a vivid image of the future. It's based on a story by Philip K. Dick, whose writing was the basis for Blade Runner and Total Recall.
The film takes place in 2054, when Washingtonians shuttle between ultra-large skyscrapers in mass-transit magnetic levitation pods that move horizontally on roads and vertically up buildings.
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