Minority Report

Released 2002
Stars Tom Cruise, Max von Sydow, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Kathryn Morris
Directed by Steven Spielberg

The year is 2054. In many ways, the United States is the same five decades into the future as it is today, but, in other, important ways, it has changed. Washington D.C., once the murder capital of the union, is now the safest place to live - thanks in large part to the Department of Pre-Crime, an elite taskforce of law officers who, by using the predictive capabilities of three captive "precogs", know that a murder is going to happen before it takes place. Armed with that knowledge, they can arrest someone before he actually kills, saving the victim(s) and preventing the crime. The head of the Department is Director Burgess (Max von Sydow), a dispassionate man who has shepherded the group through eight years of growing pains and is now on the verge of losing control of it as the program goes national.

Summary by James Berardinelli

SPOILER ALERT -- This could have been a brilliant philosophical film about personal freedom and free will, but it's an extended chase film instead. It never once raises an intriguing idea--that's an exercise left for the viewer. I had lots of questions, like why incarcerate the people who were arrested by the pre-crime unit? Since premeditated murder had been eradicated, only crimes of passion were left. The opening sequence is an example of this, but why should such people be imprisoned? Shouldn't they be arrested to prevent the crime, but then given the choice to not commit the crime? Crimes of passion are inherently committed in the heat of the moment, and most people wouldn't commit them if they had the opportunity to cool off. The potential perpetrator could be shown the pre-crime videos and put in jail long enough to cool off. If they still wished to kill, the pre-cogs would see the crime, and they could be rearrested and imprisoned for a long time. This would work because the pre-cogs only see future events; they don't see people's intentions or fantasies. Personally, I'd draw a line between the husband who caught his wife in bed and a predator who snatched a child, but the circumstances and intent would be part of the trial. None of this is ever discussed, however. Instead, there's just one non-stop chase with the obligatory red herrings about whodunit, resulting in the obvious choice of a high-ranking official setting up his protege. Haven't we seen this a million times before?

Also, what about the question of the pre-cogs? An intriguing question is whether we, as a society, are willing to enslave and torture (via the constant visions) three human beings to protect the rest of us. Automatically, most Westerners would say it's not acceptable, but I would have liked to have heard it discussed. As distasteful an idea as it is, maybe the greater good is actually worth the misery of these three people. Obviously, that decision had been made by a handful of people before this movie opens, but they convinced everyone else the pre-cogs were essentially vegetables to be used. They claimed the pre-cogs had no conscious thought themselves, but that wasn't true. How would people react if they knew the pre-cogs were constantly drugged into such a state. This topic is barely scratched at the end when the pre-crime unit is neatly dissolved, but was that the right thing to do? They tried to inject doubt about the pre-cogs by saying there was this minority report, but that turned out to be false. There was no such thing for Anderton or anyone else. At the end, the pre-crime unit was dissolved because of doubt about people's guilt, but there was no doubt. It turned out the pre-cogs were infallible, and the issue was echoes not erroneous reports. I think the story was confused by what the real issues were, and I found it a boring experience. --Bill Alward, September 2, 2002