Minority Report

Finally I was able to watch Minority Report in its entirety.  Somehow, for some reason, I was never able to watch beyond the part where John Anderton tried to escape whe his name appeared on the red ball.  So I never knew how the movie ended exactly.

Sci-fi is always so fascinating, in that when the time actually arrives of what was predicted in the stories, man can compared how far-fetched or realistic the predictions were, and how the stories had influenced the progress of technology and consequently humanity.

Minority Report paints the future 2054 as a futuristic society where homicides no longer occur, thanks to precogs that can 'see' the future and warn of impending homicides.  A crime division headed by John Anderton apprehends the 'future' criminals and places them in an artificially induced coma, thus preventing the crime from happening.  

Which begs the question.  If man can now 'predict' that a crime is going to occur, and the 'criminal' made aware of his 'impending crime', would and can the 'criminal' change his mind/will about commiting the 'crime'.  So if Anderton apprehends the 'future' criminals and prevents the 'crimes' from actually taking place, the 'crimes' thus will not happen and the 'criminals' no longer 'criminals', should they have been placed in an artificially induced coma and punished for 'crimes' they did not actually commit?  In an oblique manner, this was the question asked by Danny Witwer who came to find 'flaws' with the precrime lab that Anderton heads.

The primary theme of Minority Report is free will versus determinism, and Anderton and Lamar had amply demonstrated that free will can overwrite determinism, thus the entire concept of precrime simply cannot stand.

Minority Report is a fairly old movie from 2002, and the futuristic technology it depicted for 2054 seemed far-fetched and nonsensical in the early 2000s.  But I googled and realised that Minority Report was adapted from a 1956 novella, I was quite surprised that the theme of free will versus determinism had existed way back then.  

However, having read Brave New World recently, I am now not so surprised by the seemingly incredible dystopian future envisioned by these writers.