Minority Report

Having not already seen Minority Report, I was quite impressed with the its’ concept. The storyline was quite complex, yet I’d really like to focus this week’s paper on the philosophical and moral questions posed in this film. Based in future Washington D.C., murders are prevented by “PreCogs”, three gifted, mutant humans who can see crimes that will occur in the future. It is very effective in Washington, where they have been using this method to reduce the murder rate by nearly 100 percent. The main concern is, however, how can people be arrested before they have actually committed a crime? Is there a difference between premeditation of a crime and the actual carrying out of a crime?

The setting is one week before the vote for the National Precrime Initiative, which would make precrime the  standard all over the continental United States. Lieutenant John Anderton, played by Tom Cruise, has complete faith in the system to begin with. It is not until he finds out about a murder about to occur within 36 hours, with the perpetrator as himself, that he tries to find any holes in the existing system. Because he does not know the victim the is supposed to murder, he believes there is something amiss.

        What is very troubling is that he finds out that the Precrime program is not one hundred percent accurate all of the time. He learns about the Majority report, or the two visions of the future that are most similar out of the three. The one vision that deviates from the others is ignored, however that vision (the Minority report) still has a 1/3 chance of possibly occurring. We realize that the flawed system is responsible for the arrests of many innocent people because the only report that was taken into consideration was the Majority report.

This now brings up the classic question that has been debated for thousands of years if not more: free will versus fate, and whether or not free will can alter the future. Another question to be pondered is, does the knowledge of ones future begin a chain of events that lead to that future? These questions have been asked in Greek stories, especially ones by Sophocles including Oedipus Rex and Antigone. In these tragedies, not only does fate cause the hero’s downfall, but so do his or her own actions which further supports knowing ones future can still lead to that future. 

In the film we see that free will in fact can alter the future when Burgess shoots himself, when the precognition was for him to shoot Anderton, instead.  I truly believe that although this film was dystopian science fiction, it truly brought up important questions completely relevant to today. Not only the moral questions, but questions as to how much surveillance is too much? Retina scanning is something that already exists and that was a major technology in the film.  The government already monitors our web browsing, the stores we visit by tracking our email subscriptions, and there are video cameras everywhere. How long until what we are thinking could be incriminating as well?