Minority Report. Directed by Steven Spielberg. On general release. Rating: ★★★
For those of us in the business of predicting other people's behaviour, Minority Report is a timely reminder of human fallibility. The intriguing premise of this film is that within a few decades a combination of high tech brain imaging and old fashioned Delphic mysticism will allow fragmentary glimpses of future murders to be harvested from the uneasy dreams of a trio of drugged psychics.
This future society chooses to use the power of this precognitive technology to pursue the laudable goal of preventing murder. All murder.
Once a victim and a potential murderer have been identified special police teams (headed by John Anderton, who is played by Tom Cruise) swoop down from the sky and arrest the “perpetrator” for the crime that he or she was about to commit but didn't. This unfortunate is then hauled off and stored in a vast multistorey warehouse with no due process or right of appeal.
One might think that Steven Spielberg had access to a psychic of his own in the making of Minority Report because he seems to have made a good effort at predicting the future of justice in the United Kingdom.
The new Mental Health Bill for England and Wales embodies a kind of simplistic determinism in which all crime, whether caused by mental illness or not, is predictable and ultimately preventable. In this view it is considered acceptable to detain someone because of what they might do based on tests of limited validity rather than what they have done based on the outcome of a trial.
Just as in 2054, the year in which Spielberg's film is set, we too see public safety as paramount and we too have made the philosophical jump from punishing crime to preventing it. Our oracles are less impressive than three psychics hooked up to a brain imager, being just pieces of paper with tickboxes. But we too have managed to convince ourselves that these instruments provide an accurate picture of a single future.
Of course the future is not singular. Minority Report gets its name from the occasions when one of the three psychics dreams of an alternative future for victim and perpetrator, one in which the murder doesn't happen. These dissenting reports are destroyed to preserve public confidence in the system.
In this fictional 2054 the guilty contrive to evade the “infallible” oracle and the innocent are imprisoned. The oracle and its servants turn out to have their own agendas and absolute power, predictably, corrupts absolutely.
Spielberg has crafted a film that works well as both entertainment and prophecy. Enjoy and be warned respectively.
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DAVID JAMES ©2001 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION AND DREAMWORKS LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Tough on crimes that haven't been committed