Movie Review – Minority Report (Does the Precrime system suppress human free will or ensure the safety of society?)

Set in Washington, D.C., in 2054, the movie explores the ethical issues of prophetic technology and human free will through the story of the crime prevention system Precrime and its leader, John Anderton.

 

Minority Report is set in Washington, D.C., in the year 2054 and tells the story of the crime prevention system Precrime and its leader, John Anderton (Tom Cruise). The movie shows how crime prevention could work in a futuristic society, exploring both advanced technology and human ethics. The movie opens with a husband murdering his wife and her mistress after Precrime catches him having an affair. The team finds and arrests the man before he commits the murder because he is a prospective criminal. In other words, Precrime shows the victim, the perpetrator, and the video of the crime before it happens. This allows the team to identify future perpetrators and stop them before they commit a crime.

 

 

In the Precrime system, there were three prophets who had highly developed senses and were able to foresee future events in their minds. These mental images were then fed into a machine to show them. After the system was implemented, Washington saw a 90% reduction in crime compared to before, so it seemed to be a success. These results reinforced people’s trust in the Precrime system and played an important role in maximizing the potential of technology to predict and prevent future crimes.
Then one day, a Precrime prediction video shows team leader John Anderton murdering a man he doesn’t recognize, and he’s being hunted down. Unable to understand why he’s killing, John realizes there’s a conspiracy and sets out to find out why. Previously, John Anderton had seen a video of a woman drowning and realized it was strange, so he investigated, only to find out that it was actually a hoax. The woman in the video was the mother of Agatha, one of the prophets, and when she found her daughter, she killed her because she couldn’t run Precrime without her. However, if she did the murder outright, she would be caught on video, so she had someone else do it for her.
Realizing all of this, John Anderton blows the whistle on the whole thing, and tries to get Lamar Burgess to kill him. The footage is captured by the PreCrime team, but Lamar Burgess changes his mind and takes his own life. Through this process, the problems of Precrime are revealed, and the crime prevention system is eventually abolished.
In fact, I had many questions from the beginning of this movie. I thought that if we can prevent crimes in advance, why arrest potential criminals when we don’t need to arrest them. Also, as the last part of the movie shows, the future is not simply predicted, but can be changed by human free will. This raises deep philosophical questions about human nature and free will, and reminds us that decisions about the future cannot rely on prophecy. If there were a god-like entity that could accurately predict the future, I wonder if this system would have been able to continue instead of being abolished.
It made me realize that no matter how good a system is, it is still run by humans, and if their hearts are not in the right place, there is room for abuse. I thought that even a good system is useless if a person manipulates the system for their own purposes, like Lama Virgeth in the movie. Also, when we look at the Precrime prophets, we can see that they are both human and non-human and are used for prophecy. This made me think about human dignity. I also questioned for whom is this a good system for preventing crime if it exploits others.

 

 

Lastly, while watching this movie, I was intrigued by the various high-tech roads, cars, and houses in the middle of the movie. By raising social and ethical issues alongside the advanced technology of the future, the movie delivers a deeper message than just a science fiction movie. But beyond that, I think this movie is a good movie to think about the human heart and dignity. In the end, this movie makes you think deeply about the impact of technological advancement on human society and asks important questions about how to balance humanity and technology.