Minority Report (2002)

What would you do if you were accused of a murder, you had not committed... yet?

Original Title :	Minority Report
Director :	Steven Spielberg
Writer :	Philip K. Dick Scott Frank Jon Cohen
Genre :	Action
	Sci-Fi
Country :	USA
Language :	English
Producer :	Jan de Bont , Bonnie Curtis , Michael Doven , Gary Goldman , Sergio Mimica-Gezzan , Gerald R. Molen , Walter F. Parkes , Ronald Shusett
Music :	John Williams
Photography :	Janusz Kaminski
Distributor :	20th Century Fox
MPAA Rating :	Rated PG-13 for violence, brief language, some sexuality and drug content.
IMDB ID :	0181689
Official site :	http://www.foxjapan.com/movies/minority/index.html
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poster for "Minority Report" by Steven Spielberg (2002)

Minority Report (2002) - Steven Spielberg

Starring

Tom Cruise		Detective John Anderton
Max von Sydow		Director Lamar Burgess
Max von Sydow		Director Lamar Burgess

Plot

Based on a Philip K. Dick short story, Minority Report is about a cop in the future working in a division of the police department that arrests killers before they commit the crimes courtesy of some future viewing technology. Cruise's character has the tables turned on him when he is accused of a future crime and must find out what brought it about and stop it before it can happen In the year 2054, a so-called "pre-crime division" is working around Washington, DC. Its purpose is to use the precog(nitive) potential of three genetically altered humans to prevent murders. When the three precogs, who only work together, floating connected in a tank of fluid, have a vision, the names of the victim and the perpetrator as well as video imagery of the crime and the exact time it will happen, are given out to the special cops who then try to prevent the crime from happening. But there is a political dilemma: If someone is arrested before he commits a murder, can the person be accused of the murder, which - because of the arrest - never took place? The project of pre-crime, at the time being in a state of trial run, is going to be voted about in the near future. If people accept it, the crime rate is going to drop drastically, but it never will be known if there might not be too many people imprisoned, some or even all of them innocent. After John Anderton lost his son to a crime a six years ago, he took up drugs, and works the precog division like nobody else. One day, his own name arrives in the "perpetrator" chute, and the precogs predict that he will kill a man he never knew in less than 36 hours. John takes off, his trust in the system diminishing rapidly. His own colleagues after him, John follows a very small trace that might hold the key to his innocence, a strange unsolved yet predicted murder and a so-called "minority report", a documentation of one of the rare events in which a precog sees something different than the other two.

Comments

Good movie, not great. Relies strongly on "pre-determination." The film gets its name from a mention, half-way into the film, that when one of the three "predictions" differs from the other two it is suppressed as a "minority report" so as to not cause a furor. The main protagonist, John (Tom Cruise), pursues this to see if there is a flaw in the pre-crime arrests and perhaps innocent people are incarcerated. If you take away the futuristic setting of this film, and all the special effects, it is quite an ordinary film noire "whodunnit." Crime fighters are at work, someone double-crosses, an innocent person is framed, he goes on the run, has to figure out the bad guy. Same story has been done many times. To his great credit, Spielberg didn't just try to invent what technology will be prevalent in 50 years, he held a retreat with experts in various fields and used their input for the film's design. Perhaps the most likely to be implemented are the various retinal scanners to identify people, and even target public advertisements as individuals walk past. The whole story of "Minority Report" would fall apart without (1) the belief in God who creates a pre-determined universe and (2) God will choose to communicate the pre-determined path. In the two depicted "future" murders the film uses, at least 3 or 4 people are involved in the images that are transmitted as "future" events. In a random universe, it is quite unlikely that the events, even only 20 or 30 minutes in the future, would happen exactly as predicted, and it would be impossible for any one participant to "see" all the others. Therefore, it would have to be a supreme being, causing a pre-determination, and communicating it. For me, and probably for most others, that idea is so foreign that we can never take the concept as even a "what if" premise.Interesting science fiction, but may work better as a comedy (like Back To The Future or Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure) rather than a dark drama. SPOILERS follow -- Turns out John's mentor, the old and wise Lamar (Max von Sydow) needed to murder Agatha's (Samantha Morton) mother to keep Agatha as one, and the most effective, of the three predictors. So as not to get caught he hired a drifter to murder someone else at the very same spot, edge of a lake, dressed in the same clothes. When he duplicated it with Agatha's mother they thought it was an deja vu echo, and ignored it, because he had set up the system to work that way. The pre-crime division was dissolved, the three predictors, who had been the only survivors of a genetic experiment, lived out their lives in seclusion near the ocean.