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Predicting crime: The science behind 'Minority Report'

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It's been 21 years since Minority Report , which is now streaming on Peacock , hit theaters and brought the notion of pre-crime to movie-going audiences around the world. Based on Philip K. Dick 's novella The Minority Report , the story centers on three clairvoyant humans known as precogs, capable of predicting violent crime before it happens. John Anderton ( Tom Cruise ), the pre-crime chief who is tasked with stopping the would-be crimes the precogs predict, is himself accused of a murder he hasn't committed ... yet.

RELATED: Stream Minority Report right now on Peacock.

As Anderton evades the law, including his own coworkers, in an attempt to clear his name, audiences are asked to consider the morale calculus of convicting people in advance of crimes, even if it means saving lives. So far at least, it's not a question we've actually had to consider. The laws as they are written today require you to have committed a crime or be in the process of committing a crime in order to be held liable — at least that's how things are supposed to work — but might we someday reach a point where our ability to predict human behavior stops crimes before they happen?

CAN HUMAN BEHAVIOR BE ACCURATELY PREDICTED?

In theory, maybe? It kind of depends on what version of reality you subscribe to. Probably we can look at demographics, family histories, and life experiences, and predict with some level of confidence what a person is statistically likely to do, but that's not the same as saying that John Anderton will commit a murder on a specific date in 2054.

In order for precrime to really grab hold, we'd need a system for reliably predicting precisely what a person will do at any given time. Some philosophers take this for granted, at least hypothetically, as a consequence of hard determinism .

Modern science is built on the foundation that things in the natural world are predictable . The laws of nature act on bodies like stars and planets and send them whirling about their celestial planes on measurable, predictable paths. We can predict eclipses far into the future, down to the minute and we can predict orbital paths of space probes as they maneuver between planets on their way out of the solar system. That's because we have a decent understanding of the forces they'll encounter along the way.

Determinism presupposes that human beings are no different, at their core, than a ball bouncing down a hill. Throw someone at any situation at a given time, speed, and with a lifetime's worth of prior causes and experiences, and they'll react in ways which are determined by those prior causes and experiences. The hard determinist suggests that human behavior is unpredictable today not because it's fundamentally so, but because we don't have the computing power — either inherently or technologically — to crunch the numbers on how they'll react.

Precogs in Minority Report (2002) Photo: Minority Report (2002) Official Trailer #1 - Tom Cruise Sci-Fi Action Movie/Movieclips Classic Trailers

Given a sufficiently powerful computer, or a set of precogs, and you could know the future in quite the same way as we know the past. Indeed, such a worldview suggests that from the moment of the Big Bang, the universe has played out, and will continue to play out, in the only way it ever could have. It's almost as if existence is reading out a script and each of us is only a player in a pre-planned drama 14 billion years in the making.

Of course, quantum mechanics throw something of a wrench in this way of thinking. There appears to be a certain amount of uncertainty built into nature when you drill down to the very small. However, there is an argument to be made that the quantum gap in our understanding is just that, rather than true randomness. Whether that is borne out remains to be seen. It might also be true that quantum randomness fades away in macroscopic systems, as certainly seems to be the case when we look at stellar systems and galaxies. The question then becomes which side of the boundary human beings reside in.

If we accept that we are purely material objects — that we are not fundamentally different from anything else in the universe, however chemically complex we may be — then it stands to reason that our actions are as predictable as anything else. That would mean that, eventually, we may need to reckon with predicting crime and all of the moral quandaries that come with it.

PREDICTIVE POLICING IN THE REAL WORLD

In the absence of a computing entity or a trio of mutated human psychics capable of predicting our every action, law enforcement agencies are turning to algorithms, and they are not perfect!

Many police precincts around the United States are relying on predictive algorithms to tell them where to patrol and what they might expect on their beat. As reported by Science , policing entities are increasingly relying on computer programs to analyze the patterns of crime in their neighborhoods as a means of determining where crime might happen next.

Tom Cruise playing the system in Minority Report (2002) Photo: Minority Report (2002) Official Trailer #1 - Tom Cruise Sci-Fi Action Movie/Movieclips Classic Trailers

Fundamentally, this makes a certain amount of sense, if crime exists in a particular area, then it's likely to propagate outward from there. Verbal scuffles tend to evolve into violent altercations, but there's likely a gap in the way we calculate these sorts of crimes. Prior observations have shown exactly what we expect that crime begets crime. Where there's one crime, there's more than likely to be another.

The reality is, however, that biases inherent in our every day lives persist in our computer programs. Computer algorithms are only as good as the data we feed into them, and studies have shown that they carry and sometimes exacerbate racial and demographic biases, whether we consider them consciously or not.

At present, police entities are using algorithms to identify not just potential criminals, but also potential victims and they struggle to differentiate between the two. As mentioned in the above study, effectively predicting crime would require a 1,000-fold increase in predictive power before it could reliably pinpoint crime.

The fact is that we can't reliably differentiate between victims and perpetrators and until we can, our predictive algorithms are less than worthless, particularly when we consider the racial and class biases inherent in our calculations. While predicting crime might be the future of our society, it's only as good as the inputs we provide, and those are questionable at best.

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Minority Report

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Watch Minority Report with a subscription on Paramount+, Apple TV+, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

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Thought-provoking and visceral, Steven Spielberg successfully combines high concept ideas and high octane action in this fast and febrile sci-fi thriller.

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Steven Spielberg

Chief Paul Anderton

Colin Farrell

Danny Witwer

Samantha Morton

Max von Sydow

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Dr. Iris Hineman

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Movie news & guides, this movie is featured in the following articles., critics reviews.

Minority Report Predicted the Future We Are Already Living In

Minority Report opened in June 2002. But Steven Spielberg’s brilliant vision of the future depicts much of what people are already living today.

Minority Report opened two decades ago, but its foundations remain contemporary. The themes dealt with predicting the future, specifically future murders that could be avoided and have their perpetrators arrested. But despite an interesting premise and teaming Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise for the first time, the movie got overshadowed by the post-9/11 paranoia, which hurt its success. However, all these years later, Minority Report is a cult classic that accurately predicted many issues the world is dealing with today.

While the film still takes place in the future, specifically 2054, the Precrime Department uses three individuals with psychic abilities to prevent murders in the future. They got aided by a surveillance system that constantly monitors people, which was not a great addition at the time of release. The movie opened in 2002, not even a year after 9/11 when changes in surveillance happened that would never get reversed. In fact, the extreme surveillance society portrayed in 2054 has a lot of similarities with modern-day's.

RELATED: Minority Report Is Steven Spielberg’s Most Underrated Film

When Chief of Police John Anderton (Tom Cruise) sees himself committing a crime in the future, he runs, only to discover that he’s getting framed. Cruise then becomes the face of the everyday man, which highlights system's flaws and the corruption it may provoke. This prediction policy ties directly to contemporary machine learning, which allows organizations to collect existing innocuous data through technology to predict powerful insights about certain individuals. “The Internet is watching us now. If they want to, they can see what sites you visit,” said Spielberg in an interview at the time Minority Report opened. “In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us.”

Of course, today's algorithms can tailor ads to each individual, as does YouTube and Netflix with suggestions based on previously searched or watched shows. In Minority Report , Anderton passes a row of digital ads catered specifically to him, even shouting his name. Later in the movie, he enters a Gap store where a holographic store greeter inquires about shoppers’ previous purchases. “The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we're part of the medium,” continued Spielberg. “The scary thing is, we'll lose our right to privacy."

RELATED: Steven Spielberg’s ‘Smartest’ Filmmaking Approach Includes Hiring Women

It’s challenging to draw a line as to which technology gets created without a catch. As Spielberg said , everyone wants to be part of what’s new, even if silently, which means accepting losing privacy. Data generated by machine learning should get handled with care, but one cannot stop the fast pace at which the world evolves, particularly with technology. In that regard, Minority Report also predicted other advances such as the self-driving car, facial and eye scanner, the house with voice control, multi-touch interfaces and video calls.

Minority Report was a movie ahead of its time . It even unconsciously mirrored the age of surveillance that was only just beginning. Society may still be quite far from 2054, but the movie serves as a cautionary tale to watch out for unethical practices that may derive from an ever-evolving technological world.

Minority Report (2002)

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Minority Report: 6 predictions that came true, 15 years on

We may be a long way off from the film's dystopian 2054 setting, but a surprising amount of its technologies already exist today, article bookmarked.

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We may have arrived at the 15th anniversary of Steven Spielberg's game-changing sci-fi Minority Report , but we're still a long way off from the film's dystopian 2054 setting.

That hasn't, however, stopped the film from becoming an eerie prediction of the state of modern technology; all wrapped in the tale of Washington's DC PreCrime unit, which seeks to prevent murders before they happen through the future visions of three mutated humans, known as PreCogs.

An outfit that falls to pieces when its own captain, John Anderton (Tom Cruise), is witnessed in one of these predictions killing another man. In his desperate hunt to clear his name, John uncovers that the PreCogs do not always agree. Sometimes an alternate vision of the future is produced, known as a minority report.

• Minority Report-style technology arrives: Introducing hands-free

What's perhaps surprising to anyone re-visiting the film today, however, is how much less futuristic it actually feels in 2017. It's incredible, really, to consider how rapidly technology has advanced since Minority Report 's 2002 release.

We've taken a look at some of the futuristic predictions Minority Report made that have now simply become our reality.

Driverless Cars

One of Minority Report 's most memorable scenes sees John, pursued, attempt to make his escape by traversing an entire highway of glass-domed, driverless cars. Of course, not many have missed Google's various experimentations ( some successful, some not-so-successful ) with self-driving cars.

The automotive future Minority Report presents here seems but an inevitability.

Personalised Ads

John is seemingly followed everywhere he goes in the city by ads screaming his name, shouting for his attention. We're not quite there yet, though both Japanese Company NEC and IBM are currently developing personalised billboards.

More familiar, perhaps, is the recent slate of personalised advertising that can currently be seen on Twitter and Channel 4's streaming service 4OD; Alien: Covenant recently took advantage of both platforms to deliver creepy, personalised messages to consumers .

Voice-controlled Homes

It may have felt futuristic for John to be able to control his home purely though his voice (he turns the wall screen on with a simple command, for example), but home automation is not only commonplace these days, but is becoming a booming business.

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Indeed, the highly-popular Amazon Echo and Google Home can be linked to other devices to serve as a kind of central control for the home: they can play music, they can turn lights on and off, turn up the heat, or even lock doors.

Facial and Optical Recognition

From 2011 onwards, the FBI has been involved in the development of what's been termed NGI, or Next Generation Identification, which integrates palm print, retina scans, and facial recognition to help computers search for criminal history. In the film, John attempts to evade the citywide optical recognition system through a risky black market eye transplant.

The facial recognition database is currently believed to consist of around 411.9 million images , the bulk of which are connected to people with no history of criminal activity.

A lot of people came away from Minority Report with one thought: how can I do the cool computer swiping thing with my fingers? What seemed like science-fiction then has since certainly become reality: multi-touch interfaces have been developed by the likes of Microsoft, Obscura Digital, MIT, and Intel.

You can even live out your Minority Report fantasies with a gaming console now, thanks to the Kinect technology developed for the Xbox 360, and later Xbox One.

Predictive Policing

Although some of Minority Report 's predictions have seen cool, new ways to control and use the technology around us, it came with a dire warning of the intrusiveness that same technology brings. Indeed, CNN reports that a study last year from organisation UpTurn found that 20 of the US' largest police forces have already engaged in predictive policing.

Just as John discovers the PreCogs aren't always consistent in their visions, police departments are swiftly learning that algorithms are hardly infallible.

"When you have machine learning algorithms making decisions, they will often make mistakes," Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a computer science professor at the University of Utah, told CNN . "Rather than trying to hide the fact they will make mistakes, you want to be very open and up front about it."

Unfortunately, the algorithms used aren't widely available so that they can be analysed as to whether they suffer from flaws or biases in their data input, as it would apparently violate their 'trade secrets'. There's no knowing yet whether predictive policing is doing more damage than good.

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‘minority report’: thr’s 2002 review.

On June 21, 2002, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise unveiled the thriller 'Minority Report' in theaters.

By Kirk Honeycutt

Kirk Honeycutt

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On June 21, 2002, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise unveiled the thriller Minority Report in theaters, where it became a summer hit and, later, an enduring sci-fi  classic. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review is below: 

All good science fiction is really a speculation about social and political trends. Thus, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report , a rousing film-noir suspenser set in a world of labor-saving devices and McLuhan-esque technology, is a thought-provoking inquiry into just how far we as a society want to go to make our environment safe.

Spielberg poses the question in one of his most compelling and entertaining films ever. Following A.I. Artificial Intelligence , he continues to push into new fictional terrain that is grittier, creepier and edgier than the warm-and-fuzzy science fiction of his early career. And he is willing to leave an audience unsettled. Even with something of a happy ending, Minority Report  is the most troubling kind of speculative fiction. There is much to absorb here, almost too much for a single viewing, which probably means the kind of repeat business on which box-office bonanzas are built.

For star Tom Cruise, too, the point of reference is his last film, Vanilla Sky , where he also played a man caught in a technological nightmare in which his very identity and destiny get thrown into confusion. While going over the top in that film, here he delivers one of his most controlled and suggestive performances. Pain and hysteria stay bottled up within his character, a man who completely buys into a crime-prevention system then finds himself outside that system, battling the very thing that gave him self-worth.

A complex, intricate screenplay by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen derives from a story by sci-fi master Philip K. Dick. The film takes place in Washington a half-century from now. Cruise’s chief John Anderton heads an experimental Pre-Crime unit, which takes advantage of a freak scientific accident that produced three psychic human beings, who can see murders before they occur.

In Pre-Crime headquarters, these “Pre-Cogs,” bathed in biological fluids and drugged into a semi-comatose state, channel horrific visions of the future into a computer. John brings these images up on a large glass screen, where he can separate and analyze the pictures to glean clues about the “victims,” the “murderers” and sites of these crimes, thereby preventing them from ever happening. In six years, the Pre-Cogs have never been wrong. Or have they?

(This elite unit operates only in the D.C. area, but the government plans to take the system nationwide. The major plot hole is that nothing explains why the psychic abilities of the Pre-Cogs extends only as far as D.C. or how the government intends to expand those abilities across the nation.)

John is a man on a mission. He lost a small son six years before and, haunted by that crime, buries himself in crime prevention. Then suddenly, the Pre-Cogs insist he will murder a stranger within 36 hours, forcing him to run from his own unit. A rival FBI agent (Colin Farrell) is also hot on his trail, a pursuit made all the easier by the fact that his Magnetic-Levitation car can be controlled by others, and scanners throughout the city track anyone’s whereabouts by scanning the eyes.

As John runs, he must figure out not only why he would kill a total stranger but — if he is indeed being set up — what this has to do with his tragic past, his boss (Max von Sydow ), estranged wife (Kathryn Morris) and a research scientist (Lois Smith) who developed the Pre-Cogs.

The film has several amazing set pieces few filmmakers could pull off. There is a terrific chase between Cruise and his own elite police force through mean inner-city streets and into a robotics car factory. In a later sequence, a disguised Cruise must break into Pre-Crime headquarters and spirit away a Pre-Cog, Agatha (Samantha Morton), who holds the key to his salvation. There is also a very creepy sequence in which a doctor (Peter Stormare ), operating — literally — outside the law, performs a dual eye transplant on Cruise in the grimiest of tenements.

While Cruise anchors the movie, a brave performance by Morton and rock-solid supporting work give the movie extra ballast. Shorn of hair and eyebrows, Morton is a fragile figure, waif-like yet willfully determined to have a hand in her own liberation despite a time-continuum confusion. Farrell is suitably oily as an antagonist who is not quite a villain but might have resisted the cliches of gum chewing and a three-day beard. For von Sydow , this is an overly familiar performance, but Smith and Stormare offer off-center personalities that enliven their individual scenes.

The details of this future world filter out as part of the film’s narrative drive rather than as show-off effects. One of John Williams’ subtlest scores in years, somewhat reminiscent of the work Bernard Herrmann did for Hitchcock, brings a certain amount of tension without his usual lush orchestrations. Longtime Spielberg cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s de-saturated color pulls all the disparate worlds — the scruffy streets, cold and gleaming interiors, magnetic highways and the womb-like Pre-Cog Chamber — into a dark, unified whole.

As more aspects of science and crime-fighting in this future society emerge, the film probes the moral underpinnnings . The Orwellian nature of the new technology is obvious, but Spielberg sees this less as the intrusion of Big Brother than Big Business. The eye scans, useful to police, are vital to commercial interests to track customers. Technology is not necessarily the enemy — homes spring to life in helpful, efficient ways — but privacy vanishes. — Kirk Honeycutt , originally published on June 17, 2002.

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Minority report ending: anne lively & leo crow's murders explained.

Minority Report's ending reveals the truth about the murders of Anne Lively and Leo Crow - and the disturbing secrets behind Precrime.

Steven Spielberg 's 2002 sci-fi thriller Minority Report unravels a twisted murder mystery that keeps the revelations coming right up until the end. Based on the story of the same name by Philip K. Dick, Minority Report stars Tom Cruise as John Anderton, the Chief of the Precrime Unit in a futuristic vision of Washington, DC. Using three psychics called "precogs," Precrime is able to see murders before they happen and prevent them. The perpetrators are arrested, sentenced and imprisoned on the basis that they unquestionably would have murdered someone if they hadn't been stopped.

With Precrime on the brink of becoming a national program, a federal investigator called Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) arrives on the scene to search for flaws in the system. Shortly thereafter, the precogs experience a vision of John murdering a man called Leo Crow (Mike Binder), whom he has never met. Believing that Witwer has set him up, John goes on the run in an effort to buy enough time to prove his innocence. His search for the truth leads him to the strange case of a woman called Anne Lively (Jessica Harper), who was saved from a drowning murder by Precrime cops, only to go missing immediately afterwards.

Related: The Best Sci-Fi Movies of the 2010s

John also learns about a cover-up within Precrime. Occasionally, one of the precogs' visions will disagree with the other two, generating a so-called "minority report" that is deleted so that there can be no doubt about Precrime's certainty of the future. Believing that he must have a minority report, John returns to Precrime and kidnaps the strongest of the precogs, Agatha (Samantha Morton). With the minutes ticking down to his supposed murder of Leo Crow, John still has no clue who his victim is or why he would want to kill him... that is, until he reaches Crow's apartment.

How (& Why) John Was Set Up to Murder Leo Crow

John's murder of Leo Crow was indeed premeditated - but not by John. It was orchestrated by Lamar Burgess ( Max von Sydow ), one of the founders of Precrime and a close friend of John's. Lamar planned the murder after John came to him to ask about Anne Lively, and why Agatha's vision of Lively's death was missing from the system. Knowing that John had gotten too close to a dark truth that could destroy Precrime just before the program went national, Lamar used what he knew to be John's greatest weakness against him: the disappearance of his son, Sean (Tyler Patrick Jones), in Baltimore six years previously.

Lamar arranged for a criminal called Leo Crow to be released from prison, and promised him that if he agreed to be murdered by John, his family would be well taken care of. He instructed Leo to stay in an apartment with what Witwer calls an " orgy of evidence " spread out over the bed: hundreds of pictures of children, including faked photos of Leo with Sean. When pressed by John, Leo also offered chilling fictional details of how Sean died - drowned in a weighted barrel - as well as hints that he had sexually abused Sean before killing him. All of this is enough to make John accept that he is destined to murder Leo Crow. However, John ultimately lets the deadline for the murder pass and instead tries to arrest Leo. A desperate Leo reveals that he was paid to lie about murdering Sean, and uses John's gun to kill himself.

Leo Crow's murder creates a predestination paradox, since the only way John knew to look for a man called Leo Crow was because he had already seen a vision of himself killing him, and he was only able to find the apartment by using clues he had seen in the vision. Even though John doesn't have a minority report, his decision not to kill Leo Crow undermines the reliability of Precrime in a different way: by knowing his future, John was able to change it. If he was able to make that decision, then many of the criminals he has arrested over the years could have done the same.

Related: Why Steven Spielberg Doesn't Like Hook (But Audiences Do)

What Really Happened to John's Son

With Leo Crow revealed to be a fake, viewers may be left wondering what really happened to Sean. Minority Report deliberately leaves this question unanswered, so that by the end of the movie we still don't know any more than John: he was holding his breath underwater at a public pool, and when he came up again Sean had disappeared. We don't know who took Sean, how he died, or even whether he might still be alive somewhere. Speaking in a 2002 interview with Roger Ebert , Spielberg explained that some questions in Minority Report  had been deliberately left unanswered:

“I had John Huston in my ear. I went back and looked at The Maltese Falcon and [Howard] Hawks’ The Big Sleep—to see how some of those film noir mysteries were resolved. They didn’t dot every i and cross every t. They tried to keep you off-balance. They asked more questions than they could answer in those days.”

Within the story, the fact that Sean's disappearance is left a mystery is vitally important, because the trauma of losing his son is what fuels John's faith in Precrime. The program shows visions of murders that can be replayed, paused and enhanced so that John can zero in on them and find the answers - something that he was unable to do for Sean. By the end of the movie, John's acceptance that Precrime has to die is also a symbol of him accepting that he will never know what happened to Sean, and finally being prepared to move on.

How (& Why) Anne Lively Was Murdered

Minority Report 's story really begins six years before the start of the movie, when Lamar found a way to do the impossible: commit a murder in a world where the police can see murders before they happen. Lamar killed Anne Lively for the same reason that he later set up John to murder Leo Crow - in order to protect Precrime. Though the precogs are publicly billed as a miracle gift to humanity, Dr. Hineman (Lois Smith) reveals to John that they are actually the children of mothers who were addicted to an early version of neuroin, the same drug that John uses. Being exposed to neuroin in utero inflicted terrible brain damage on the children, with most of them dying at an early age. However, those who survived experienced visions of murders that hadn't happened yet, and they became the basis for Precrime.

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Anne Lively was Agatha's mother, a neuroin addict who went to a rehabilitation facility and managed to beat her addiction. After cleaning herself up, she wanted to have her little girl back. Lamar couldn't allow Anne to take Agatha away, since the precogs function as a hive mind and the other two - twin brothers called Arthur (Michael Dickmann) and Dashiell (Matthew Dickmann) - don't "work" without Agatha. He also couldn't risk Anne publicly demanding the return of her daughter, since that would draw attention to the welfare of the precogs. A display outside Precrime headquarters feeds tourists a string of lies about the precogs' living conditions, making it clear that their tortured confinement to the pool is just one of Precrime's many secrets.

To pull off Anne Lively's murder, Lamar used a phenomenon called an "echo," where the precogs experience replays of past visions. He told Anne to come and meet him at a lake, and paid a drug-addicted drifter to try and drown her. After watching the vision of her death, Lamar knew all the details of how the original murder would have played out. He then waited by the lake for the drifter to be arrested by Precrime and, after they had left, murdered Anne Lively himself in the exact same way. The precogs sent a vision of that murder as well, but it was dismissed as merely an echo and deleted.

Why Lamar Burgess's Final Choice Destroys Precrime

In Minority Report 's ending, Lamar Burgess is offered the same dilemma that John Anderton is in Philip K. Dick's original story: he can either commit a murder and doom himself, but save Precrime in the progress; or he can choose not to commit the predicted murder, thereby exposing a fatal flaw in Precrime and destroying his own creation. With the murder already predicted and Precrime officers closing in, Lamar chooses to shoot himself in the chest. Earlier in the film he told Witwer, " I don't want John Anderton hurt " - and despite all his lies, it seems that this statement was completely honest. Realizing he has a choice, Lamar decides to take his own life rather than kill John, because he cannot bear to witness his legacy being dismantled.

Had Lamar chosen to shoot John, he would have been arrested for the murder (along with the murder of Anne Lively), but he also would have proven that Precrime works. Leo Crow's supposed murder was spun as a "human flaw" in Precrime, due to officers failing to reach the scene in time, and John Anderton's death would have been treated the same way. Precrime could still have gone national, and Lamar's legacy would have been preserved. In choosing not to shoot John, Lamar proves very publicly what John had already discovered earlier in the movie: that a person who knows their future is able to change it, and therefore the precogs' visions are not certain. This leads to Precrime being disbanded and the precogs being released.

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The Real Meaning of Minority Report's Ending

Like many other stories about time travel and futuristic visions, Minority Report asks the question of whether the future - once known - can be changed. Terminator: Dark Fate answered this same question by suggesting that certain things are inevitable and will happen despite efforts to avert them; after Sarah Connor prevented the rise of Skynet, another computer system called Legion took its place and led to a similar downfall of humanity. When Leo Crow dies in almost the exact same way that the vision predicted, despite John choosing not to kill him, it seems that Minority Report might be drawing a similar conclusion.

Danny Witwer criticizes Precrime at the start of Minority Report , asking how they can be certain that a murder would definitely have happened. In response, John rolls a ball towards him. When Witwer catches it in order to prevent it from falling, John posits that the fact that he caught it doesn't change the fact that it was definitely going to fall. Unlike the rolling ball, however, John and Lamar are able to choose not to fall (metaphorically speaking). The element of human agency in the equation is what makes the precogs' visions not entirely certain, and is also responsible for the creation of minority reports.

Along the way, Minority Report also questions the ethics of punishing someone for something that they were going to do but haven't done yet. A favorite topic of ethical debate is whether or not it would be justifiable to go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler as a baby. The action is generally said to be flawed in two respects: first, that killing baby Hitler is no guarantee that some other person will fill the place in history that Hitler did, with the same outcome; and second, that even if killing baby Hitler would prevent the Holocaust, you would still be killing an innocent baby. In Minority Report Precrime faces the same dilemma, and justifies locking up future murderers on the basis that there's no reasonable doubt that they wouldn't have killed their victim. The ending of Minority Report proves that such reasonable doubt exists, making the case that no one's path in life is completely predetermined, and people can choose differently even when it seems like there's no turning back.

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To See or Not to See: ‘Minority Report’ on Surveillance and Data Collection

Twenty years after the film's release, science fiction resembles everyday life in the way we trade privacy for ease of use.

Minority Report opens with a dreamlike montage that revolves around sight: a close-up of an eye, a pair of glasses, and scissors cutting eyeholes in an Abraham Lincoln mask. A woman is presently stabbed with the same scissors. We learn these images are a precognitive vision of a homicide, one that is prevented when John Anderton ( Tom Cruise ) storms the crime scene (significantly pushing the would-be killer’s hand through a window). From its opening moments it’s clear that Minority Report has the act of seeing very much in mind, although in this futuristic world being seen is equally important.

Minority Report is part of a sequence of science fiction films that Steven Spielberg made at the turn of the century, including A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and War of the Worlds (2005). This was a return to the genre that had seen two of his biggest early career successes ( Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ) and the chance to handle some weighty science fiction issues. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (a project that had been in development with the late Stanley Kubrick for years) deals with the moral implications of creating artificial life, while War of the Worlds updates H.G. Wells ’ classic to imagine how a country-wide disaster might play out in modern-day America. Minority Report is arguably the most successful of the three films on a thematic level, predicting key issues in surveillance and data manipulation to come in the two decades following its release.

In the year 2054, law enforcement in Washington D.C. uses “precogs,” individuals with the ability to see the future, to prevent murders. Chief John Anderton oversees the city’s Precrime Program, which analyses data from the precogs and makes arrests with the evidence. When a precog vision shows him shooting a stranger, Anderton goes on the run, chased by his former colleagues and an ambitious investigator from the Department of Justice, Danny Witwer ( Colin Farrell ). In trying to clear his name, Anderton discovers that the visions of the precogs are not as infallible as the Director of Precrime ( Max von Sydow ) would like the world to believe.

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For a Spielberg film (which is typified by style in service of story, rather than the style as story of contemporaries such as Brian de Palma ), Minority Report is unusual in its obsessive focus on a single motif. In addition to the many images of eyes (both seeing and sightless) in the precog visions, we get plot devices involving eyeball implants and replacements, a red herring about a man staring in a window, and Anderton’s compulsive viewing of old home movies. He's addicted to a designer drug called Clarity, sold to him by a dealer with gaping eye sockets. In one scene (a welcome hit of Spielbergian comedy), Anderton even chases his removed eyeballs down a ramp, catching one by the severed optic nerve before it falls through a grate.

The acute focus on sight in relation to crime recalls Alfred Hitchcock ’s best films, such as Rear Window and Vertigo , in which investigative work is framed in terms of compulsive or voyeuristic intent. There’s certainly something of the Hitchcock hero to Anderton, whose seeing is compromised by his own drives and guilt. Spielberg also gives a nod to the master of suspense in a factory-set action scene where Anderton emerges from a freshly constructed car and drives away. It was an idea that Hitchcock had wanted to use for his man-on-the-run classic North by Northwest , although in his version it was a corpse that would appear in a newly made vehicle.

Yet Spielberg intends more than a futuristic take on a Hitchcock pursuit thriller. The antagonistic Witwer is introduced to question Anderton’s belief in Precrime, and to raise the obvious issues of free will and determinism posed by the process. It’s in one of their discussions about the religious connotations of the precogs and their handlers that a key theme is elucidated. On learning that the chamber in which the precogs are kept is called “the temple," Witwer dismisses the idea they are gods by stating, “the oracle doesn’t have the power… it lies with the priests.” Indeed, the precogs are used as data-gathering tools and the way in which that information is manipulated is a central concern of the film.

While behavioral data is collected on citizens through the precog visions, Anderton’s situation (in which he sees the data, goes on the run, and meets his intended victim as a result) raises whether the act of collection changes the behavior of the subject. It’s a classic sci-fi paradox that was posed in the 1956 Philip K. Dick novella on which the film was based. However, Minority Report was released shortly before the first iteration of Facebook. Within 15 years, Cambridge Analytica was harvesting its data to build trait profiles of 70 million Americans that would be used with the aim of changing voter behavior. Real-life had caught up with the philosophical question of free will very quickly. In 2018, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, it appeared that the power really did reside with the contemporary data priests.

Minority Report was also prescient about the way data is collected and under what conditions. While the precogs are a sci-fi gambit straight out of Dick’s oeuvre (full of characters with extra-sensory abilities that create paradoxical situations), the film’s other technology is more believable. Washington in 2054 is divided into two distinct areas, a sleekly beautiful city of maglevs and malls above, and an undeveloped slum known as “the Sprawl” below. In both areas, citizens have been fitted with ocular implants that can be scanned for personal data, whether by security cameras or spider-like robots. It’s clearly a surveillance state, and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński reinforces this by capturing the city scenes with a color-drained palette, recalling the whites and grays of CCTV footage. But the filmmakers are smart in their anticipation that this has not come as the result of a dystopian overthrow of the government. Rather, we see citizens benefiting from the implants as they receive tailored recommendations in the shopping mall, pass through security checks, and board the subway without the need for a physical ticket.

In this manner, the film anticipates our current relationship with data and technology. Every time we download a free app or agree to the terms and conditions on social media, there’s the potential exchange of information about ourselves in return for a product. When we install internet-linked security cameras around our homes or accept cookies that track our movements, we’re sacrificing a measure of privacy in return for utility. Minority Report even shows Anderton’s automated apartment, which turns on lights and starts a chosen playlist when he comes home, prefiguring the internet of things.

As we know, this quid pro quo is fraught with problems, which the film also anticipates. The targeted advertisements in the mall become a source of anxiety for the fugitive Anderton as his eyes are pinged by every store and billboard camera. In one brilliant piece of futurism, a man on the subway reads a tablet-like newspaper displaying a picture of Anderton’s face and the headline, “Precrime Hunts its Own.” This occurs just moments after Anderton has gone on the run, foreseeing a world in which surveillance and media combine to create an almost instantaneous news cycle. Anderton’s only option is to have his eyeballs removed and replaced, suggesting that in the future disconnection from the information grid will be painfully difficult.

Then again, Anderton is a bad person – a fugitive because the state has predicted that he will commit a crime. People who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear from technology that only makes their lives better and safer. Of course, Minority Report doesn’t side with such a view (Anderton’s journey is about discovering the flaws in the system), but it’s one that is commonly expressed in support of increased surveillance. In 2001, the City of London had over a million CCTV cameras. By 2005, it had four times as many, almost one camera for every person who lived in the city. At the time of Minority Report 's release, surveillance infrastructure was exploding in the real world.

With this in mind, the film's Washington setting seems especially important, representing the seat of both government and the judicial system. In early scenes, we see Anderton video-conferencing a pair of judges during a Precrime investigation and using them to make determinations on the case. At the alleged crime scene, Precrime officers simultaneously make an arrest and deliver a sentence, fitting the perpetrator with a collar that puts them in suspended animation. In support of increased safety (we are told the murder rate has dropped to zero in Washington under Precrime) due process in the legal system has been subverted. Anderton’s discovery of the flawed prosecution of thousands of people points to the dangers of putting technology above human rights. In the film’s coda, Anderton states that the people convicted under Precrime were unconditionally pardoned and released, qualifying this by adding, “although police departments kept watch on many of them for years to come.” The outcome is clear: even with evidence of abuse, the mechanism of the surveillance state will continue.

Of any mainstream director from his generation, Spielberg’s films most often concern children, either directly or through the lens of their adult characters. His run of sci-fi films from this period is significant for their focus here. A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a retelling of Pinocchio in its story of a child robot seeking love and family. War of the Worlds concerns an immature man (also played by Cruise) who bonds with and takes responsibility for his children through disaster. In Minority Report , Anderton is driven to support Precrime after the abduction of his son (importantly in a moment when he let him out of his sight). However, his urge to protect has become unhealthy, both through his arrested emotional state and his blind support for a technology that is harmful to civil liberty. His ultimate rejection of Precrime is the rejection of a system that infantilizes the individual, taking away choice and creating a state of constant watchfulness in the name of protection. Twenty years later, when so much of what it depicted has come to pass, Minority Report looks less like entertainment and more like a warning.

20 years ago, Minority Report predicted a future that feels eerily like today

The Steven Spielberg film all about faked prescience has turned out to be genuinely prescient—and often imitated

Think of Minority Report and your mind’s eye probably conjures up Tom Cruise wildly gesticulating as he moves computer “screens” through thin air. But the storyline that drives the film (and the original short story it’s based on) — a breakneck good-guy-versus-government-corruption battle fueled by state-sponsored paranoia — means Minority Report has never felt more relevant. And as a result, often imitated.

Based on a 1956 short story by Philip K. Dick, Minority Report is set in 2054 and a future where Washington D.C. is monitored by an experimental law enforcement division known as the Precrime program. Its goal: prevent murders by knowing when they’ll happen. That all hinges on the abilities of three humans, known as “Precogs,” who are capable of looking into the future. Precrime officers act on the Precogs’ visions, arresting supposed murderers before they get the chance to act. The system seemingly works until the Precogs mark commanding officer John Anderton ( Tom Cruise ) as a future murderer, and he’s forced to go on the run. In the process of trying to clear his name, Anderton spars with Colin Farrell’s Danny Witwer, a rival government agent, and discovers a dangerous conspiracy hidden in Precrime’s history.

Given it was directed by Steven Spielberg , there’s little surprise that the film itself continues to hold up. Minority Report is as entertaining and technically brilliant as anything else the Jaws filmmaker has created. It moves at a breakneck pace and features standout performances from Farrell and Samantha Morton (as Agatha, the most adept of Precrime’s three Precogs).

It’s worth revisiting just for its stunning one-take aerial sequence. The now-iconic scene, which unfolds about halfway through the film and follows the Precrime’s Spyder robots as they scan the various residents of an apartment complex, is one of Spielberg’s more jaw-dropping visual moments.

John Anderton (Tom Cruise) finds himself surrounded by a swarm of Spyder robots in one of the tensest moments in Minority Report.

What makes Minority Report feel relevant today is the paranoia, stoked by a deep distrust of Big Brother, that underpins the film. In a post-Snowden world where both the U.S. government and private businesses alike gather more information about American citizens than they ever have before, Minority Report ’s concerns no longer seem like science fiction so much as present-day fact. Even in relation to the ubiquity of target marketing and social media algorithms, the film can read as a warning against technologically-enhanced assumptions in the hands of institutions that keep promising that it’s all for our benefit.

What’s more, Philip K. Dick’s depiction of “pre-crime,” brought to life by Spielberg, has clearly lodged itself in the minds of Hollywood filmmakers. Even Marvel borrowed the “What if you could stop crime before it happened?” premise twice now. First for 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier , which revolves around a government plan to preemptively target potential terrorist threats, and then again in this year’s Moon Knight . The central antagonist in the Disney+ series is a cult leader intent on dispatching anyone who his deity believes may one day hurt another person.

The result is that, 20 years on, Minority Report — the story and the film — is something of a triple threat. It’s quietly influential. It’s an underrated entry in Spielberg’s career. And it’s enduringly relevant, increasingly so, year after year.

Colin Farrell as Danny Witwer in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report .

This article was originally published on June 18, 2022

• Science Fiction

The Movie That Accurately Predicted the Future of Technology

Much of the sci-fi technology imagined in 2002 is a reality in 2014. Let's count the ways:

Facial Recognition

Remember when having your phone tapped seemed invasive?

The FBI's new facial recognition service, NGI, allows law enforcement to scan your face or retina so that a computer can determine if it ranks in the top 50 mugs associated with a crime. Results come with 85-percent certainty, so rest easy-ish.

The "FBI plans to have 52 million photos in its NGI face recognition database by next year," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation , which obtained specifics on NGI earlier this year. "One of our biggest concerns about NGI has been the fact that it will include non-criminal as well as criminal face images. We now know that FBI projects that by 2015, the database will include 4.3 million images taken for non-criminal purposes."

To be clear, NGI is not only used by the FBI but also "more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies and other authorized criminal justice partners 24 hours a day, 365 days a year," according to the FBI's press release.

Big Brother is watching you in high definition now — your back, profile, tattoos, scars, family, and friends.

Personalized Advertising

In 2014, this is known as personalized retargeting or remarketing. Our modern equivalent is not quite as obnoxious as hearing your name shouted by John Anderton's (Tom Cruise) inescapable holograms, but it's not far from it.

"The reality is these technologies are not coming in 2054; the technologies are here now," said Whaleshark Media's senior VP in an advertising conference last year.

Personalized retargeting makes up most of the Internet ads you see. Cookies allow companies to track your Internet behavior so that ads can suit your interests. This is why the space that might show an American Airlines ad on a frequent flyer's browser will show duck calls on an avid hunter's browser.

Predictive Crime Fighting

"Precogs are pattern-recognition filters. That's all." —John Anderton

In 2005, the Memphis Police Department developed a prognostic policing method "using analytics to fight crime before it happens."

Faced with a growing crime rate and a shrinking budget, Memphis's Director of Police Services Larry Godwin was desperate for a new approach. Traditional police work just couldn't keep pace with modern crimes any longer, so he turned to innovation for a solution. He shared crime data with a criminology professor to devise a statistical means of targeting where and how crime is likely to happen.

After developing a new pilot program, the department tested it for three days, and the results were astounding. The first time MPD experimented with the new approach, they preemptively intercepted crime hot spots and "made some 70 arrests in just the first two hours — a number usually made on an average weekend — and went on to make a total of 1,200." After seeing the program's success, the Memphis PD teamed with IBM to create Blue C.R.U.S.H. (Crime Reduction Utilizing Statistical History).

Since the program's inception, the Memphis PD has seen a 30 percent decrease in overall crime, and police across the world have adopted the technology.

Gesture-Based User Interface

When John Anderton moved his hands to and fro to manipulate digital images, it was a total mindfk in 2002. In 2014, it's child's play, literally. The original Nintendo Wii came out in 2006 and introduced the world to games that respond to user gestures using a handheld controller. When the novelty wore off, it became apparent that the original Wii is little more than postmillennial Duck Hunt .

In 2010 Microsoft launched Kinect, a gesture-based UI that recognizes and responds to users' limbs without need for a controller or even gloves like John Anderton's.

Today, this same technology has expanded from the game world to the office and emergency rooms . Modern surgeons trust the hands-free tech to expedite life-and-death decisions, just like in Anderton did.

Driverless Cars

Google was the first to take the driverless car seriously, and the concept is here to stay. Four states have already passed legislation to permit the hands-free vehicles: Nevada, Florida, California, and Michigan. Last week, Audi received the first permit to let autonomous cars loose in California.

Voice-Automated Homes

John Anderton told his home to play video on the "wall screen" so that he could get stoned on futuristic air duster and wallow in self-pity to saccharine family flicks.

You too can join this techno-pity party with the help of voice-responsive home technology. Companies such as CastleOS , VoicePod , and the poorly named HAL allow you to activate locks, lights, air conditioning, and electronics with the power of your voice.

However, good luck trying to open those pod bay doors .

Robotic Insects

In 2012, Harvard lab master Rob Wood gave flight to the world's smallest microdrone, RoboBee . The tiny robot has wings that flap independently and mimic the maneuvers of a housefly. Unlike the larger Nano Hummingbird , InstantEye , and dragonfly drones , the RoboBee is the size of a penny.

However, scientists are still developing an onboard power source to fuel RoboBee's furious flapping. Using microfabrication, Wood aims "to shrink onboard batteries, and he's collaborating with researchers at Harvard, the University of Washington, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to pursue novel batteries, micro fuel cells, and wireless power transfer," reports Popular Science . "He estimates he is only one or two years away from his first autonomous-power demonstration."

The Martin Jetpack was named one of Time 's Top 50 Inventions for 2010 , but it will not be available to consumers for some time. It's bulky as hell, sounds like a go-cart on steroids, and will come with a price tag nearing $150,000, but it is a reality.

For those with slimmer wallets and less patience, 30-minute rentals of water jetpacks will run you around $250 at select locations across the country.

Or you can give powered paragliding a go.

Unfortunately (fortunately), the world is still waiting on a few terrifying Minority Report predictions:

Gravity Guns

Sick sticks, overpopulated prisons.

Oh wait, never mind on that last one.

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Minority Report Tried to Warn Us About Technology

Steven Spielberg’s film predicted how having more convenience would mean sacrificing personal freedom.

In Minority Report , when the detective John Anderton goes on the run in Washington, D.C., one of the first things he needs to do is swap out his eyes. The police of Steven Spielberg’s film, set in 2054, are not the only ones tracking people with eye-scanning machines mounted around the city. Public transit does so too, as does every business, and even all the billboards, which scream slogans such as “John Anderton! You could use a Guinness right about now!” as he walks by them.

That tracking system is the most mundanely frightening part of the film’s surveillance-state future, in which you might be arrested for a crime you haven’t yet committed. After a harrowing back-alley surgery, Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) reemerges into society with a new set of eyes. When he pops into a store, a holographic attendant greets him cheerfully: “Hello, Mr. Yakamoto! Welcome back to the Gap! How did those assorted tank tops work out for you?” The laugh line is much needed in a high-tension movie, but when I watched Minority Report recently, in a time when every social-media app I use seems to be listening to and anticipating my wants and desires, the gag sent a new chill up my spine.

When Minority Report hit theaters 20 years ago, it was marketed mainly as a long-awaited first-time collaboration between Hollywood’s biggest director and one of its biggest stars. Beyond that, 20th Century Fox and DreamWorks mostly promised an action-packed chase movie, pushing the punchy tagline “Everybody runs.” The film certainly delivers on that front, with some of the most inventive visual flourishes of Spielberg’s career. In one scene, a team of flying policemen smashes into an apartment where dinner’s being made, and one of their jet packs flash-fries some burger patties . In another, Anderton fights his would-be captors in an auto factory, dives into the assembly line, and then drives away in a newly built car—a set piece Alfred Hitchcock had once supposedly fantasized about including in North by Northwest.

And yet: Every bit of Spielbergian fun in Minority Report is laced with unspoken menace. Lexus designed the avant-garde cars, depicting what automobiles of tomorrow might actually look like. The sleek design is appealing, but the car is also a self-driving pod that offers its user no real control, changing direction to take Anderton straight to jail when he’s eventually discovered. A wide array of forward-thinking technology in the film was cooked up by experts whom Spielberg asked to envision life five decades hence, and in almost every case, advances in convenience come with insidious restrictions on personal freedom.

Read: Minority Report and the drawbacks of foresight

The central concept of Minority Report , based on a novella by Philip K. Dick, is that D.C.’s new “Precrime” division has eliminated murder in the city by tapping the brains of three psychics dubbed “precogs,” whose dreams of death are used to prevent killings before they happen. The notion is troubling: Police scrutiny has expanded into a guessed-at future, though the program is publicly presented as such a triumphant success that the city is lobbying to expand it nationally. “We are arresting individuals who have broken no law,” grouses Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell), the Department of Justice agent brought in to evaluate the system. But they will , he’s assured. Anderton is Precrime’s most devoted advocate—until the precogs predict that he’ll murder someone in the next 36 hours.

That’s when he goes on the run, resolute in the belief (like much of the quarry he’s chased) that he’s innocent. And then the superficially benevolent culture around him starts to close in. The viewer never sees any public opposition to Precrime, or to the brutal tactics employed by its agency; propagandistic commercials boasting about the end of murder are seemingly enough to silence any protest. One extraordinary sequence sees Anderton hiding out in an apartment building after his eye surgery. The cops storm in, but rather than simply batter down doors, they toss out insect-like drones named “Spyders” that roam the halls, scanning every inhabitant. In one unbroken shot , the camera pans from room to room as the Spyders breach each home, a sinister manifestation of a society without privacy.

Minority Report ’s world building never feels particularly didactic—Spielberg’s persistent need to entertain his viewers means that even the most unsettling material is a delight to watch and rewatch. Still, the film was not quite a runaway success on the scale of his other releases around that time, such as The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Saving Private Ryan . It grossed only $132 million domestically. Summer theatergoers may have picked up on the movie’s gloomy tone: Spielberg’s regular cinematographer, Janusz Kamiński, gave it a washed-out color palette by overlighting scenes and then bleach-bypassing the film negative, similar to what he’d done for Saving Private Ryan . The aesthetic is pitch-perfect for the noir-y tale Spielberg is telling. But in the summer after September 11, 2001, the films that did best at the box office had a much poppier accent, including Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and the breakout hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding .

The dark outlook is, however, of a piece with much of Spielberg’s oeuvre in the 2000s. In the years just before and after Minority Report , his output ranged from mercilessly sad to doggedly bittersweet. By 2005, he’d made two of his grimmest works and his most obvious responses to 9/11, War of the Worlds (which reunited him with Tom Cruise) and the acidic revenge film Munich . War of the Worlds depicts mass destruction (via alien invasion) with visceral terror, and Munich investigates the worthlessness and cruelty of government-sponsored vengeance after a national tragedy.

But Minority Report , though it was written and filmed before 9/11, might be Spielberg’s most prescient work of all. Tasked with predicting our near future, he imagined an America filled with dazzling inventions but rotting from the inside out, one in which the erosion of civil liberties is thinly veiled by chest-thumping braggadocio about technology’s power to solve every problem. Spielberg's eye-scanning cameras and autocratic cops could easily be exchanged with the overreach of the PATRIOT Act, or the NSA listening in to casual conversations. The film’s warning is one the world is only beginning to heed. We may not have precogs dreaming of murders in police precincts, but so much beloved technology of today is just as effective at watching and constricting our lives.

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Minority Report to be rebooted as 'female-led' TV show

The 2002 Tom Cruise sci-fi thriller, about law enforcers who can predict crime before it happens, is to be developed into TV series by 20th Century Fox

Minority Report, the 2002 Spielberg-directed hit sci-fi film that starred Tom Cruise, is to be rebooted for TV by 20th Century Fox.

The thriller, derived from a Philip K Dick short story, concerns a future in which crime is detected before it happens by a team of “precogs” – humans who can see the future. Cruise’s character is a “precrime” police officer who is suspected of planning to murder someone he has never met.

Fox’s TV spin-off , greenlit for a pilot at this stage, will be set 10 years after the Precrime division has been dismantled. It will focus on one of the three precogs, who still has visions of the future. He meets a female detective (with issues of her own, naturally), who will work with him and try to utilise his gift. It is set to be written by Max Borenstein, who recently worked on the updated film version of Godzilla.

For the original film, Spielberg commissioned technologists to think about innovations we could see by the year 2054. Some of them are already with us , at least in a rudimentary form – the manipulable visual interfaces used by Cruise to monitor crime scenes have been created by a number of technology companies including Microsoft, militaries have been experimenting with insect-like drones and advertising is often personally targeted to individuals.

Fox will co-produce the pilot with Amblin and Paramount. This is the latest TV version of an earlier film from that studio, with School of Rock, Ghost, Terminator and The Truman Show all at various stages of development for the small screen.

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How Hollywood softened us up for NSA surveillance

Why Minority Report was spot on

Minority Report review – Steven Spielberg’s exhilarating thrill-ride into the future

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Tom Cruise's 'Minority Report' has arrived in real life - South Korean police turn to AI to predict crimes and drug tracking

• South Korea

Friday, 03 Nov 2023

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Plans by the South Korean police include the creation of a metaverse police agency. - PHOTO: THE KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK

SEOUL: In the 2002 movie 'Minority Report', Tom Cruise leads an unit called Precrime, a specialised police department, apprehends criminals by use of AI and foreknowledge provided by three psychics called "precogs".

While it may not be excatly the same, AI may play a big part in preventing crime and that may be soon be seen in South Korea.

The South Korean police has unveiled a four-year blueprint for using artificial intelligence to predict and combat crimes.

They believe the technology can help fill security gaps in the rural areas caused by the high concentration of police personnel in Seoul and the metropolitan area.

The police will also seek to use artificial intelligence to improve their investigative abilities and the technology to combat voice phishing.

The plan includes a program to develop an algorithm that analyses unusual online behaviour patterns to predict stalking and sex crimes.

Also, research is under way to develop technology that uses security cameras to detect abnormal behaviour and whether someone is carrying a weapon.

To better tackle drug trafficking, a real-time map to keep track of drug cases to help trace distribution routes will be built.

Other plans include establishing a police agency metaverse, developing a system to automatically track banned virtual assets, and creating a cyber training institution at the Advanced Public Security Centre.

In addition, officers will be provided with bulletproof clothing and strength-enhancing robotic augmentations to their uniforms.

South Korea has seen an increase in economic and financial crimes, with the number rising from 290,000 in 2015 to 410,000 in 2020.

The number of drug offenders is also up, with the number of people investigated for drug crimes jumping from 12,000 in 2018 to 18,000 in 2020.

In the first half of 2023, a total of 925 cases of murder, bodily harm or assault took place. And 18 of them were classified as serious crimes with abnormal motives, commonly referred to as mudjima or “don’t ask why” attacks – unprovoked and sudden acts of violence targeting strangers.

The plan, which requires approval by the Presidential Advisory Council on Science and Technology, will be finalised by the end of 2023 after consultations with the relevant ministries. THE KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK

Tags / Keywords: South Korea , Cops , Turn to AI , Prevent AI , Druig Trafficking

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This Week in Genre History: Minority Report predicted our future

Welcome to This Week in Genre History , where Tim Grierson and Will Leitch, the hosts of the Grierson & Leitch podcast, take turns looking back at the world's greatest, craziest, most infamous genre movies on the week that they were first released.

For years, Hollywood tried to make a movie out of The Minority Report , the 1956 short story from Philip K. Dick , the visionary sci-fi writer whose work inspired Blade Runner and Total Recall . Then Steven Spielberg took the reins, approaching Scott Frank, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Out of Sight , to crack the story. There was one problem, though: Frank didn't consider himself much of a sci-fi guy. Spielberg wasn't concerned: "I said, 'Let me worry about the sci-fi element," he once recalled to the late Roger Ebert , about Frank. "Just write a terrific detective yarn. This taps into your strength. This is a murder mystery, a film noir, a whodunit.'"

Of course, Minority Report , which hit theaters on June 21, 2002, was much more than just a simple whodunit. Set in the year 2054 — when Washington, D.C.'s police is overseen by PreCrime, an elite law enforcement unit that arrests criminals before they can commit illegal acts — the movie starred Tom Cruise as John Anderton, a dogged PreCrime captain who's wholly devoted to his job, especially since his young son went missing and his wife left him. But soon, Anderton himself will be the target of his unit, which is powered by the PreCogs, a trio of psychics who can predict crimes and believe he will commit murder. Anderton goes on the run, trying to clear his name even though he hasn't done anything wrong. And because he lives in a future where retinal scans are everywhere so that the police (and advertisers) can find you at any moment, that means he's going to need some new eyeballs, which led to one of the film's most upsetting scenes.

Besides being a gripping action-thriller, Minority Report was a dark commentary on post-9/11 life — specifically, our collective anxiety about an American government that was increasingly invading our privacy in the name of national security. Disturbingly, that element of the film has only grown more prescient over time — not to mention its prediction of an extremely online society in which corporations target us individually in insidious ways.

That all of these bleak real-world ideas exist in what is, ostensibly, a summer popcorn movie featuring one of the planet's biggest movie stars, remains remarkable. Nearly 20 years later, Minority Report is both a terrific blockbuster and endlessly thought-provoking. It still feels ahead of its time.

Why was it a big deal at the time? Spielberg was already a two-time Oscar winner, cementing his reputation with 1998's Saving Private Ryan as a filmmaker capable of huge spectacle and serious drama. No longer dismissed as "just" the entertaining showman behind Jaws and the Indiana Jones movies, he was now in his 50s and essentially had his pick of projects. After Saving Private Ryan , he had turned his attention to a moody sci-fi drama close to his heart, A.I. Artificial Intelligence , which had been birthed by his hero Stanley Kubrick, resulting in a movie that evinced a darker view of humanity than you'd expect from one of cinema's great optimists. When Spielberg was getting ready for Minority Report , that darkness was still on his mind.

"Not a lot of skepticism has gotten into my work," he said around the film's release. "Certainly in the last few films — Amistad, Schindler's List , and Private Ryan , and A.I. and Minority Report — there's been a, well, I'm not sure I'd call it skepticism, but a being unafraid of the dark truth, the difficult realities. I feel as I've gotten older, I've gotten more courageous."

And if you're trying to be fearless, it makes sense that you'd work with Cruise, who's made his name doing his own death-defying stunts . Like Spielberg, he'd been showing newfound depth in his recent films, working with Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut and Paul Thomas Anderson on Magnolia , memorably portraying the rabid misogynist Frank T.J. Mackey. But this was still a man who could put butts in seats: 2000's Mission: Impossible II was one of that year's biggest hits. So with Minority Report , you had this perfect storm of a blockbuster star and blockbuster director, both at the peak of their powers, deciding to trust their instincts and take chances. Storyboards weren't used — they simply hatched ideas on set every day.

"He's very experimental, and he's very prone to wanting to have the director say, 'Let's go off what you prepared and memorized, and let's go off script and try something new,'" Spielberg said of Cruise during a BBC interview. "He loves that. He lives for that ... Tom was always encouraging me to explore along with him and find things for him to do that were new and he hadn't done before."

Where Spielberg focused his preparation was in designing Minority Report 's future world, assembling experts for a three-day summit during preproduction. "When we started brainstorming we invited some of the far-reaching thinkers in the areas of science and medicine, technology, transportation, and the environment to imagine what the near future would bring," he told WIRED in 2002, later adding, "We had all of them in one room talking to each other. Most of the software in the movie is based on their suggestions of what it will be like in 50 years."

But what Spielberg couldn't have possibly imagined when he shot his film in the first half of 2001 was the tragedy of 9/11 that was soon to come. Released about nine months after the attacks on New York and Washington D.C., Minority Report was always meant to be a somber, noir-ish action movie — suddenly, though, it was a dystopian tentpole that felt incredibly timely.

What was the impact? Although boosted by glowing reviews, Minority Report wasn't a colossal hit, no doubt in part because of its downbeat story. The summer of 2002 was largely dominated by escapist films that helped audiences forgot the trauma of 9/11 — Attack of the Clones, Austin Powers in Goldmember , Men in Black II — and it's understandable that viewers weren't ready for a movie that unconsciously reflected this disturbing new age of terrorism and the surveillance state. (As film critic Roger Ebert pointed out at the time , America's new Department of Homeland Security was being proposed almost exactly when Minority Report came out.)

Nonetheless, the film served as a mirror, presenting a society in which law enforcement prosecutes citizens without a trial, all in the name of keeping people safe. As the U.S. government ramped up surveillance and warrantless wiretapping, eroding civil liberties in the process, Minority Report illustrated the dangers in such a system when (as Anderton learns) the watchdogs are corrupt.

And that's to say nothing of the movie's suggestion that we'd lose our privacy in other ways, too. Once Anderton goes on the lam, he discovers just how hard it is to hide when public digital ads can find you anywhere, trying to sell you things based on your previous purchases. "The Internet is watching us now," Spielberg said in 2002 . "If they want to, they can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we're part of the medium. The scary thing [is], we'll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us."

Eighteen years ago, Spielberg basically predicted our modern reality.

Has it held up? This remains one of Spielberg and Cruise's nerviest big-budget efforts. Minority Report is filled with excellent action set pieces, but it ripples with paranoia and dread as we follow along with Anderton on his desperate mission to save himself. (As Spielberg later put it , "I think my first direction to Tom was, 'No smiling!' I think I told him, 'You'll smile three times in this film. I'm not even sure where those three times will be. We'll discover those times together.'") It presents a world in which no one is really free — just like Anderton, we're all being monitored.

In subsequent years, there have been plenty of articles detailing what Minority Report got right about the future, including driverless cars and multi-touch interfaces. But what's perhaps scariest is that corporate marketing strategies are starting to follow the film's lead. In 2015, Jeff Malmad, the head of the marketing company Mindshare North America, predicted that wearable technology will allow "your shopping experience or your travel experience [to] be tailored so that the world around you bends to your likes and interests. …When I walk into that store my playlist could be running in the background, different lights could shine on clothing that will likely interest me, or that I've already searched for in that app."

Spielberg and Cruise would team up a few years later for a remake of War of the Worlds , which was a much bigger commercial success than Minority Report and a more overt commentary on 9/11 anxiety. But the quiet hum of menace that courses through Minority Report — and its bold, bleak look at where we're headed — still echoes today.

As Jon Cohen, Minority Report 's other credited screenwriter, saw it, the film had a simple but powerful message. "It's about righting a wrong," he said . "The system stinks: Fight it. Someone is suffering: Help them. Also, don't let anybody mess with your eyeballs."

Tim Grierson is the co-host of The Grierson & Leitch Podcast , where he and Will Leitch review films old and new. Follow them on Twitter or visit their site .

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Lewis Hamilton Regrets Turning Down Tom Cruise For ‘Top Gun: Maverick' Role

Lewis Hamilton is producing a Formula 1 movie with Joseph Kosinski starring Brad Pitt.

The British racing star could have worked with the filmmaker on Top Gun: Maverick had it not been for his conflicting work schedule.

In a new interview, Hamilton revealed he lobbied Tom Cruise to star in a possible Top Gun sequel before the 2022 film was made.

"I will even be a janitor," Hamilton recalled in a GQ interview talking about his conversation with Cruise. "Just let me be in it."

When Maverick entered the casting stage, Cruise remembered Hamilton and offered him a role as a pilot, but the racer had to decline due to his schedule, something he now regrets.

“Firstly, I hadn't even had, like, an acting lesson," he said. "And I don't want to be the one that lets this movie down. And then secondly, I just really didn't have the time to dedicate to it. I remember having to tell Joe and Tom - and it broke my heart. And then I regretted it, naturally, when they show me the movie and it's: It could've been me!”

Although he didn’t have the opportunity to work with Kosinski in Top Gun: Maverick , he will now work with him in the Formula 1 film.

“My point was: Guys, this movie needs to be so authentic,” Hamilton said. “There's two different fan groups that we have - like, the old originals, who from the day they're born hearing the Grand Prix music every weekend and watching with their families, to the new generation that just learned about it today through Netflix.”

He continued, "I felt my job really has been to try to call BS. ‘This would never happen.' ‘This is how it would be.' ‘This is how it could happen.' Just giving them advice about what racing is really about and what, as a racing fan, would appeal and what would not."

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