Minority Report - Critical Film Analysis by Lara Dragoi
In the dystopian reality of the American blockbuster “Minority Report” by Steven Spielberg, neither murder nor homicide exist. The film released in 2002 actually takes place in the year 2054 in Washington D.C. A so called “PreCrime Unit” invented a system using “PreCogs”, three mutated humans who previsualize crime by seeing the future. They dream murders that are determined to happen, but before the crimes can actually be committed, the PreCrime Unit intervenes and arrests the criminal without any trial or court case.
In this film, Tom Cruise plays the lead role of John Anderton, the current chief of PreCrime. The story begins at the point when he becomes the primary suspect of a predicted murder. He desperately tries to prove he is innocent and that the whole thing is a set up because he is certain he could never commit a crime that gruesome. The film picks up a classic theme of philosophy and therefore leads me to the first knowledge question:
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The mathematician and physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) encapsulates the perfect balance between scientific determinism of physics in a thought experiment: If an intelligence knew about all the fundamental forces of nature at any given time and could process all the relations of every single part of the universe… then it would be able to predict movements and universal connections of particles for all points in the future.
Since the brain is a dynamic physical system, it is quite possible that all the thought processes in our heads are all influenced and concluded by previous ones - thus also