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Steven Spielberg keeps getting darker and darker. His latest film, Minority Report, features a dystopic future in which the state knows the whereabouts of its citizens via eye scanning, and advertisers custom design their pitches to customers via the same technology. In the mid-21st century Washington D.C., a pre-crime division of the police helps cops arrest murderers before they commit their crimes, thanks to the work of "precogs"—young adults born of drug addicts who can foresee murders. The images from their brains are extracted and downloaded, and the police put the pieces together to stop future murders from taking place. The murder rate in the capital has decreased substantially, but at what cost? An investigator from the Attorney General's office is trying to find out if there are any flaws in the system.

The protagonist is John Anderton (Tom Cruise), a pre-crime cop whose son was kidnapped and never found. John's motivation for working in the division is to prevent crimes like this from happening again. He has also been a dope addict since that horrible event. His day of reckoning comes when he witnesses a precognitive vision of himself murdering a man he doesn't know. The investigator and John's colleagues go after him, while he goes on the run and tries to find out who set him up.

During the filming of AI, Neptune's transit through Aquarius squared Spielberg's natal Moon. As I wrote in my AI essay, this transit correlated with David (the Moon child) submerged in the Neptunian ocean, looking for the mythic Blue Fairy. Both AI and Minority Report have similar cinematographic styles, incorporating foggy blues and greys, a gauzy feeling that coincides with the unreality of Neptune.

While Minority Report was in production from March to July 2001, Neptune was exactly opposing Spielberg's natal Saturn. This archetypal combination permeates the film. Neptune is water, image, visions, mysticism, drug use. Saturn darkens and brings out the negative in planets it contacts in hard aspect. This combination manifests in the following ways: (Please note that although I don't give away the ending, I do reveal some key emotional moments in the film.)

  • John Anderton attempts to transcend the painful reality of his child's abduction through the use of narcotics.
  • Several people question the reality (Saturn) of the precogs' visions (Neptune), i.e., does not the "minority report" challenge the validity of the pre-crime program?
  • John pulls the female precog out of the "temple," thus traumatizing her. Saturn is separation. The "temple" is the name for the pool of water in which the three precogs are submerged, while being constantly pumped up with endorphins to bliss them out. Neptune correlates not only with the water, but with the spiritualization of it by the pre-crime unit. Saturn-Neptune is also the disruption of the oceanic consciousness of the baby in the womb. The precogs are in a toxic womb experience—being exposed to horrific images and emotions, yet being unable to escape (Saturn).
  • Another negative water experience is when John's child is abducted while John is trying to beat his child's record of staying underwater in the swimming pool.

The abduction itself relates to Spielberg's natal chart. Spielberg has Pluto square Moon, which is activated by transiting Neptune by virtue of being in natal aspect to his Saturn. Pluto (Hades) is God of the Underworld, who abducted Persephone into his domain. Pluto-Moon correlates with bringing a child into the underworld. (The same happened to AI's David, who witnessed the underworld elements of the Flesh Fair and Rouge City.) The assumption is that John's son was molested and murdered; two core themes of Pluto are sex and death.

Transiting Neptune is currently trining Spielberg's natal Neptune, and will be opposing his natal Pluto. In his upcoming films, one can expect a similar Neptunian quality applied to themes of sex, death, compulsion and power.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeffrey Kishner, MA, is an astrological counselor, writer and psychotherapist, as well as webmaster of Astrology at the Movies. He has a graduate degree in integral counseling psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies, where he first learned astrology.

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For more information about Jeffrey Kishner, click here.

 


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