Penland: Minority Report

In the 2002 film, Minority Report, an experimental police force in Washington, D.C. arrests future murderers based on the visions of three precogs; Agatha, Dashiell, and Arthur. The police force is lead by Captain Joe Anderton (Tom Cruise), who studies the precogs’ visions, gathering clues and information to find the potential murderer. Once he figures out where the murderer is, he and the police force race to arrest him, before the crime is committed, essentially eliminating crime for six years in the D.C. area.

The criminals in this movie are treated as outcasts. Their basic rights are stripped from them; the crime they were arrested for never even happened. Although the precogs are supposed to always be right about a murder, the murderers were only arrested because of something that was going to happen. Terri Murray’s essay, “Our Post-Mortal Future?” addresses this issue, saying “a ‘crime’ is meaningless unless it is done, and is a crime precisely because it is done” (137). This essay shows that the future criminals of this movie were treated unfairly because they never actually committed the crime.

One glitch with this system lies with the precogs. The precogs are human, and could have missed a murder, which does happen in the movie. The murder of Agatha’s birth mother is predicted by the precogs, and prevented from happening. However, the true murderer knows the glitch of the precogs, and commits the murder the same exact way as before. The precogs see this murder, however, the files are erased because it appears to be an echo, which is what happens when a particularly horrific murder is committed, and the precogs see the murder twice. This glitch in the system questions the reliability of the precogs, making the audience wonder if the other murders would have actually happened.

After the criminals were arrested, a police officer placed a futuristic headband on them, forcing them into a sleep-like state, where they could only see their murder over and over again for the rest of their lives. The criminals were then placed in a tube and put underground with the rest of the future criminals, basically tortured with the same image for the rest of their lives. This part of the movie was horrifying to me, because the criminals were completely de-humanized. They became merely bodies without souls after they were placed in these tubes. They were treated worse than the criminals we have today; they literally had no freedom, no movement, and no sunlight.

This clip shows how people in this movie have very little privacy because their eyes are scanned everywhere.