Minority Report (movie)
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Template:Infobox Movie Minority Report is a 2002 film by Steven Spielberg starring Tom Cruise, Max von Sydow, Samantha Morton, and Colin Farrell. It is loosely based on the Philip K. Dick short story of the same name.
Minority Report is one of several movies based on stories by Dick. The film renders a much more detailed view of a near-term future world than that present in the original short story, with depictions of a number of technologies related to the movie's themes. The film also omits certain story details (no punch cards for example). While the film's roots make it a science fiction film, it mixes in elements of a number of different genres, particularly film noir, mystery, thriller and action / adventure.
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Plot
Minority Report is set in Washington, DC during the year 2054. Thanks to three "precogs" and technology built around their ability to see murders before they happen, the city has gone six years without a murder. The group making use of the precogs is called the "Department of Pre-Crime"; the police officers and detectives within the department are empowered to act on their foreknowledge, arresting people who are about to commit a murder, and imprisoning them without a trial in a "Hall of Containment" using technology even crueler than that used to make use of the precogs. The department chief is played by Cruise, with von Sydow playing his boss. Morton plays the senior precog, nicknamed Agatha (after Agatha Christie; the nicknames of the other two, Dashiell and Arthur, are also references to the themes of the film).
The country is about to vote on expanding the Pre-Crime program nationally, which brings in the Department of Justice. Farrell plays an observer from that department, whose concerns about Pre-Crime could be motivated as much by a desire to advance his own career as from doubt about the constitutionality and absolute certainty of the Pre-Crime process and the people who run it.
The title of the movie refers to a discovery that the chief makes about the pre-cogs: they don't always agree about the future. Since there are three precogs, the "Minority Report" refers to the dissenting opinion, which the process filters out in order to preserve the sense of certainty that von Sydow's character in particular believes is required for the program's success.
The chief's discovery of the existence of minority reports is one of several clues to the mystery which drives most of the film. And it also contributes to the desperation felt by the chief when in the flash of an eye (more literally, the drop of a wooden ball), he goes from being a pre-crime cop to a pre-crime perpetrator. He learns that he is supposed to kill someone he's never met and eventually discovers a conspiracy involving the pre-cogs, an old friend, and the death (months before) of his little boy.
Similar movies
The film explores several science fiction themes common to films and novels:
- Time travel: Back to the Future, The Time Machine
- Government and personal freedom (Conspiracy thriller): 1984, Enemy of the State, Conspiracy Theory, Manchurian Candidate, A Clockwork Orange
- Voyeurism: The Truman Show
- Free will: The Matrix
- Mind vs. Reality : Total Recall, Vanilla Sky, The Butterfly Effect, Jacob's Ladder
Trivia
- In the portrayal of the future world, there were certain aspects of the imagined technology that gained some attention in the popular computer press. One sequence features Cruise's character using a futuristic graphical user interface, where several wall-sized screens were projected into space in front of a standing Cruise. With a gloved hand, Cruise uses gestures to zoom, shift and manipulate images on the projected screen.
- The film is full of chase scenes and expensive (though not gratuitous) special effects created by Industrial Light and Magic and other companies. It cost more than $100 million to make, though it made more than three times that in worldwide box office, and sold at least four million copies in its first few months of release on DVD [1] (http://www.audiorevolution.com/news/0103/17.dvd.shtml).
- In 1999, Spielberg invited fifteen experts (and the reporter Joel Garreau [2] (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A20469-2002Jun20)) to a hotel in Santa Monica, California to brainstorm and flesh out details of a possible "future reality" for the year 2054. The experts included Stewart Brand, Peter Calthorpe, Douglas Coupland, Neil Gershenfeld, biomedical researcher Shaun Jones, Jaron Lanier, and former MIT architecture dean William J. Mitchell [3] (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/spielberg.html). While the discussions didn't change key elements needed for the film's action sequences, they were influential in introducing some of the more utopian aspects of the film, though John Underkoffler, the science and technology advisor for the film, described the film as "much grayer and more ambiguous" than what we envisioned in 1999 [4] (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/underkoffler-0717.html).
- Hawthorne Plaza, a mall in Hawthorne, California where several scenes were filmed, is now abandoned [5] (http://www.urbanadventure.org/2003/2002trip/usa/la-mall.htm).
- A futuristic weapon is featured, which seems to have been designed to be non-lethal. A gun that utilises concentrated sound waves to knock a person off their feet, no doubt then allowing law enforcement officers to move in and arrest a suspect.
- The 1955 movie, House of Bamboo, can be spotted being played on a projection screen in the scene where we first see Dr. Solomon (the scene shows a man being shot in a Japanese hot-tub).
External links
- Official website (http://www.minorityreport.com/)
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- Is there a Minority Report?, or: What is Subjectivity? (http://othervoices.org/2.3/msharpe/index.html/) essay by Matthew Sharpe, Other Voices, Jan. 2005
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