How Spielberg spoiled Dick's Minority Report

Rating: Null/10 (9 June 2003)

***MILD SPOILERS*** There are some good things to this movie. It is probably the most realistic SF movie ever made, with a lot of effort put in the design and functionality of future everyday items. Also the acting is convincing, the cinematography is kept in a surrealistic colourless grey, most likely to resemble the film noir it is supposed to be.
Unfortunately, all this could have been made for just any SF movie and does not have to do anything with the short story by Philip K. Dick. As so often, the screen adaptation throws away a nice, conclusive plot, and comes up with a stupid and ridiculous replacement.
The film has almost nothing to do with the original story, except for two main characters (Anderton and Witwer) and the pre-crime department with the three precogs. The only character remotely true to the story is Witwer, whilst the Anderton of the story has nothing to do with the guy played by Tom Cruise. He is more like the charcter of Burgess, played by Max von Sydow, an aged founder of precrime, close to retirement, whose only intention is to keep the system going.
*spoiler ahead* I could accept all this, ignore the Philip K Dick title, and watch the movie as a sort of film noir in the future. But there is such a major flaw in the plot, which makes it impossible for me to enjoy it. It is the framing of Anderton by his mentor and friend Burgess. This set-up is the main plot of the movie and neither the motive (stopping Anderton from digging up some dirt in Burgess past) nor the whole set-up has anything to do with Philip K Dick. Frankly, Dick would never have come up with such a inconclusive and implausible idea.
How can you frame somebody in the future? Unless of course you can travel through time or you are god. The whole set-up is a closed loop, which can never be started in the presence. But let us not talk about this any more. Let us instead have a lock at what Dick actually wanted to tell in his story:
There is one crucial thing, which lacks in the movie despite the catchy title. In the book there is actually a minority report (even three to be precise). The point of Dicks story is that your knowledge of the future might allow you to change it (the same way as the police change the future by arresting the criminal before he commits the crime). The future is not set but under constant flow and subject to alterations and changes.
Dick's Anderton is also accused by the precogs of killing a man within the next week. He has never heard of the man before. The point here is, that with this knowledge at his hand, Anderton tries to avoid killing him. This changes the future, and is correctly predicted by the second precog as a minority report, who included into his prediction the prior knowledge of Anderton of the accusation. But during the whole affair, Anderton learns that the man he is supposed to kill and who he does not want to kill is in fact trying to bring down the whole precrime system by publishing the minority report. The only way to save his life's work is to actually kill him anyway, so that the majority report is proven correct. So he has to sacrifice himself for the system he created. He kills the man and accepts his punishment, but precrime survives.
The clue at the end: His final action was predicted by the third precog, who had also an alternate vision of the future, but this vision included prior knowledge of the minority report by Anderton. So all three precoqs saw a different future of Anderton, based on increasing amount of information available to Anderton to act. Since two of the precogs predicted murder (one and three, but under totally different circumstances), the murder (not the way how it is supposed to happen!) was the majority report released to Anderton at the beginning.
Dick points out that this situation is pretty unique and could only happen to the head of precrime (the first reader of the future), not to the `common criminal'. In the book this disagreement of the precogs is in their three minority reports is downplayed and the justification of the precrime as a correct prediction is maintained.
So what has this to do with the Spielberg movie? Nothing of course, except the title.