Minority Report Movie Review Summary

The review of this Movie prepared by Erik Hidle

Detective John Anderton (Cruise) is a top investigator with the elite Precrime unit, which uses the visions of future potential murders generated by precognitive humans (born drug babies with this special gift who are all but enslaved to serve the system) to stop killings before they happen. The potential killers are placed in suspended animation as punishment for the murders they "would have" committed. The year is 2054 and the city is Washington, DC -- with both sleek futuristic parts and mega-slums. Precrime is poised to go national, but the federal Justice Department sends Detective Ed Witwer (Farrell) to investigate it at just the moment when the precogs finger Anderton to commit a murder in three days! Certain he is innocent and has been set up, Anderton goes on the run and tries to discover who his intended victim is. Since citizens everywhere are identified by retinal scans, he must go to a back-alley doctor to get his eyes replaced; he also tracks down the inventor of the precog system, Dr. Iris Hineman (a wonderfully crusty Lois Smith) who tells him the precogs occasionally disagree, and he must find the "minority report" that may exist on his projected murder. Although there are inevitable incredibilities (e.g., Farrell and Cruise have a titanic fight that is not really necessary to the plot and hardly bruises either), the look of the movie, and its special effects, are superb, the writing and plotting very good, and the acting also strong. High marks. Almost as worthy of Philip Dick's memory (the plot is taken from a Dick short story by the same name) as "Blade Runner."

The review of this Movie prepared by David Loftus

John Anderton is captain of "pre-crime", an angency that uses the talents of three enslaved clairvoyants to predict and prevent murders in a futuristic Washington, D.C. where personal privacy is all but eliminated. The program seems to work perfectly as murder has been reduced by 90% in D.C. and some want to implement the program nationwide, so the government sends an investigator to check out pre-crime and determine its actual merit. Then, if the government's investigation isn't enough to wreck Anderton's day, the precogs announce that the next murder will be committed by... John Anderton! This is very unsettling since Anderton has no idea who the victim is or why he would even want to kill him, so his first inclination is that he's been set up, so he takes off running, manages to evade capture and begins a quest to discover who it is he's supposed to kill and why. He visits a weirdo old chick (she hangs out in a greenhouse full of genetically altered plants that can move around of their own violition) since she's the one who helped create the pre-cogs. She reveals that pre-cogs aren't always right, that sometimes one will disagree with the other two on a vision, and the dissagreement is filed away as a minority report. She tells Anderton to find the minority report and he can clear himself. The only problem is that the minority report is stored in the mind of the pre-cog named Agatha, who happens to be locked up at in the heavly guarded pre-crime lab (the pre-cogs are kept in a pool of nutirients in a semi-comatose state so that they get to do nothing except predict murders 24/7). Anderton goes to a back alley eye transplanter, evades capture yet again and busts Agatha out of pre-crime. Agatha unfortunately does not have a minority report on Anderton's future crime, but she does have some other useful information that helps him get to the bottom of things. An exceptionally well made movie founded upon an excellent script, thrilling, insiteful, thought provoking, a definite must see.

The review of this Movie prepared by sayruh