Good movie, not great. Relies strongly on "pre-determination."

Rating: Null/10 (7 January 2003)

The film gets its name from a mention, half-way into the film, that when one of the three "predictions" differs from the other two it is suppressed as a "minority report" so as to not cause a furor. The main protagonist, John (Tom Cruise), pursues this to see if there is a flaw in the pre-crime arrests and perhaps innocent people are incarcerated.
If you take away the futuristic setting of this film, and all the special effects, it is quite an ordinary film noire "whodunnit." Crime fighters are at work, someone double-crosses, an innocent person is framed, he goes on the run, has to figure out the bad guy. Same story has been done many times. To his great credit, Spielberg didn't just try to invent what technology will be prevalent in 50 years, he held a retreat with experts in various fields and used their input for the film's design. Perhaps the most likely to be implemented are the various retinal scanners to identify people, and even target public advertisements as individuals walk past.
The whole story of "Minority Report" would fall apart without (1) the belief in God who creates a pre-determined universe and (2) God will choose to communicate the pre-determined path. In the two depicted "future" murders the film uses, at least 3 or 4 people are involved in the images that are transmitted as "future" events. In a random universe, it is quite unlikely that the events, even only 20 or 30 minutes in the future, would happen exactly as predicted, and it would be impossible for any one participant to "see" all the others. Therefore, it would have to be a supreme being, causing a pre-determination, and communicating it. For me, and probably for most others, that idea is so foreign that we can never take the concept as even a "what if" premise. Interesting science fiction, but may work better as a comedy (like Back To The Future or Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure) rather than a dark drama.
SPOILERS follow -- Turns out John's mentor, the old and wise Lamar (Max von Sydow) needed to murder Agatha's (Samantha Morton) mother to keep Agatha as one, and the most effective, of the three predictors. So as not to get caught he hired a drifter to murder someone else at the very same spot, edge of a lake, dressed in the same clothes. When he duplicated it with Agatha's mother they thought it was an deja vu echo, and ignored it, because he had set up the system to work that way. The pre-crime division was dissolved, the three predictors, who had been the only survivors of a genetic experiment, lived out their lives in seclusion near the ocean.
Sept 2017 update: Just watched it again after 14 1/2 years, still an interesting story.