Themes from Minority Report

⦿ We always look up to some kind of an all-knowing larger-than-life figure to be our saviors. As children, these were our parents. As adults, some believe in a godman or in priests. In earlier times, citizens looked up to kings as representatives of god. Throughout history, we’ve put someone or other up on a pedestal and invoked them to solve problems we’re not capable of solving. In Minority Report, it becomes possible to see the future and so stop crime before it happens. This is handled by the Precrime division of the police, who are shown as super-heroic, ascending into the sky:

… or descending to the level of us commoners:

⦿ The hero, John Anderton, dedicates his life to Precrime, but is used by the father of Precrime, Lamar Burgess. Every system has loyal believers who work tirelessly to further its mission, but are sometimes manipulated by the powerful into serving the powerful’s interests rather than the stated mission. When they realise, the moral clarity and certainty they were driven by gives way to moral confusion.

⦿ There’s no such as a perfect system. Even if it’s technically perfect, humans are the weak link.

⦿ When we advocate a program to the public, we shouldn’t sweep its flaws under the carpet and present an oversimplified and rosy picture to the public. They’ll find out sooner or later, and you’ll have completely lost their trust. You’ll be in a better position if you’re transparent with the public.

⦿ Lamar Burgess becomes famous and widely respected for Precrime, and over time, his identity and self-image becomes more and more tied to Precrime. To preserve this reputation, he gets to a point of killing someone. This is eventually uncovered, leaving Precrime shut down and Burgess disgraced and dying by his own hand. The moral is to not tie your identity to your accomplishment, and never to step over ethical or legal red lines to protect it, since it will backfire, causing you to lose everything.

⦿ Do you want to sacrifice civil liberties and allow the police to barge into your house without a search warrant? There’ll always be people who’ll justify such erosions of individual power and encroachments by the state as helping achieve a good outcome (like preventing crime).

⦿ Technological advancement and social advancement are different things. Minority Report depicts a world with the former but not latter. By contrast, Star Trek: TNG shows a world with both, for example one in which there has been no crime on earth in a century.

⦿ As technology advances, marketers and criminals will find worse and worse ways to invade our lives:

As @nokaton commented:

Watch this in 2002 : Wow, future looks fascinating! This is so cool!

Watch again in 2021 : Oh shitttt. This's scary af.

Similarly, in Minority Report, you can get an illegal eye transplant to evade pervasive eye scanners that identify people. Marketing and crime evolve with technology.

⦿ Humans keep inflicting severe distress to other humans. Today, we have slaves, bonded laborers and untouchables. In Minority Report, genetic engineering creates people most of whom die before they become a teen, except for three “precogs” who can see into the future. But this makes them see murders and other horrible crimes all night long, unable to sleep well. They’re used by society to foresee crime, for which purpose they’re made to live out their lives in a tub of milky water, in an induced coma, where they can’t see the present, only the future. They’re pumped full of dopamine and endorphins to keep them happy, and brain scanners read what’s going on in their minds. This is a sub-human existence. In fact, one of the precogs describes herself as not dead, but not alive.

⦿ We may have idly speculated that it would be cool to see the future. The precogs have that gift, but all it brings them is suffering, every time they see a crime. As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for — you might just get it. Perhaps the way we are, where we’re aware of the present and the past but not the future, is the best way to live.

⦿ The future is not decided in advance. Your actions can change it. Anderton’s future involved killing a man, but when the time came, he decided not to pull the trigger.

⦿ Being able to see into the future causes all kinds of paradoxes and contradictions: if you’re told you’ll die while skydiving, knowledge of the future lets you change the future — you may decide not to skydive. Does that mean the foresight was wrong? Or was the foresight that of a future, not the future? Temporal causality is a principle of physics that states that actions can affect the future, not the past. If you break that, you end up with with these loops and contradictions.

⦿ Since the future is changeable, it’s unethical to arrest someone for something they may do. Which is why, by the end of the movie, PreCrime is shut down.

⦿ An agent Witwer becomes the Anderton’s enemy, but as the story progresses, it turns out that Witwer is after the truth, not after Anderton, and was able to conclude that the crime was committed by someone else (Burgess), at which point Burgess kills Witwer. In retrospect, Witwer wasn’t Anderton’s enemy at all. Similarly, even if someone looks like he’s against you, don’t be hasty to judge. It may just be situational and, as time passes, he may become your ally.

⦿ Burgess, the father of Precrime, turns out to have committed a murder himself, and innocent people were locked up as a result of undisclosed flaws in Precrime. The entire Precrime system is shut down, and the prisoners unconditionally pardoned and released. The heroes fall from grace, turning out to be unworthy of the pedestal they’ve been elevated to. The same has happened with others put up on a pedestal in real life, as with priests sexually abusing children. These people are supposed to watch over society, but who watches the watchers?

If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy the following analyses of Minority Report: How to tell a story in five words, Movie Review, Choice and Fate | Analysis, Movie Review and Retrospective/Review.

If you want to balance all that logical analysis with something experiential, watch: