Minority Report: Philip K. Dick

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I actually liked The Minority Report so much, that I chose the movie as my exam topic. The movie and the book are extremely different. Aside from the very basic idea of Precrime, most of what happens in the two is so different. That's why I can't judge them in comparison to one another. The movie was nice because Spielberg is a great director. Everything inside the frame in that movie is so carefully chosen that it's art. The Minority Report” tells the story of John Anderton, the creator and head of Precrime, a police agency that uses three mutants called “ precogs” to foresee and stop future crimes before they are committed. Anderton’s own system predicts that he will murder a man within the coming week, but he thinks that he is being framed. Anderton seeks to evade capture while investigating what has happened.

So, at this point, you're probably asking yourself just what my problem is. Sounds like a good book, full of paradoxes and intriguing questions about the nature of inevitability and free will... I must be a terrible person for not loving it! Deformed and retarded," Anderton instantly agreed. "Especially the girl, there. Donna is forty-five years old. But she looks about ten. The talent absorbs everything; the esp-lobe shrivels the balance of the frontal area. But what do we care? We get their prophecies. They pass on what we need. They don't understand any of it, but we do."Wow, this was surprisingly bad. The movie was pretty terrible, so I assumed that the short story had to at least be somewhat better... I was horribly wrong. In the future, there exists a world in which there's no violence as all violent acts are foreseen and stopped before they occur. But what if you are accused of killing a person you've never met for reasons you don't even know? None of this has happened yet, so there's still time to change the course of the future. How would you fight a system you thought was infallible?

And the easiest way to prevent a murder from happening is to not go to the building where the guy lives at the date and time you're supposed to kill him. This is definitely a anti-uptopian book (from Wikipedia: As in George Orwell's 1984, a dystopia does not pretend to be utopian, while an anti-utopia appears to be utopian or was intended to be so, but a fatal flaw or other factor has destroyed or twisted the intended utopian world or concept). No one comes right out and says the government and the Army is controlling the minds of the citizens, but at the end we see how everyone readily accepts whatever Kaplan says. I think Anderton's wife is the only one that brings up the subject of free will although she doesn't actually say free will. But HE knows himself and he knows that HE would never kill anyone, so he must be being framed! (Because HE'S not a criminal like those... those... CRIMINALS. Or well, like they would be if they weren't in jail for thinking about being criminals!) John Anderton is a police commissioner involved in a pioneering project called Precrime. Through information provided by suitably trained individuals called Precogs (short for Pre-Cognitives), the agency is able to identify crimes that are going to happen in the future and prevent them by arresting the perpetrator and placing him/her in a detention facility. The results of this experimental policy have been extraordinary. In the space of just a few years, violent crime has all but disappeared in New York. We enter the story when a new commissioner assistant, Ed Witwer, reports at Anderton's office, looking to be filled in on the project and not being exactly secretive about his long-term ambition to replace Anderton as commissioner one day. Needless to say, Anderton is not enamoured with his new assistant.John Anderton is the founder and head of Precrime, which stops future crimes from occurring by gathering data from three precogs—humans gifted with precognition, now reduced to caged idiot savants as their babble is recorded and collated. The day that a new assistant, Ed Witwer, joins, Anderton receives a report that he will commit a murder of an army general he does not know, Leopold Kaplan. Anderton confronts Kaplan, who harbors doubts about Precrime, and goes on the run with Kaplan’s help. Anderton is chased by Precrime agents and tries to escape with Lisa, also an agent. So the commission of a crime itself is absolute metaphysics. We claim they are culpable. They, on the other hand, eternally claim they’re innocent. And, in a sense, they are innocent.’