Minority Report And The Flaws Of A Perfect System
By: Brett Seegmiller
Tags: Storytelling, Science Fiction, Film, Movies, Cinema

One of the more fascinating movies of the early 2000s was Steven Spielberg’s cyberpunk noir thriller, Minority Report. Starring Tom Cruise, Minority Report was loaded with breathtaking chase sequences, a twisty mystery, and a high-level science-fiction concept that still gets referenced to this day.

And in a way, Minority Report is far more relevant today than when it was released back in 2002 because of the rise of invasive corporate and government surveillance.

But what is Minority Report about, exactly?

While there’s many ideas and philosophies you could drill down into with Minority Report, one of the additional themes that emerge revolves around the idea of the implementation of the organization itself.

On multiple occurrences, the PreCrime police department is referred to as a “perfect” system, but for anyone who has seen the film, we know that not to be the case.

The thing that intrigued me the last time I viewed the film was how much it went out of its way to show more than one flaw with this so-called “perfect” system, hinting that there are numerous ways the system can be hacked, mishandled, or abused.

In a way, you could say Minority Report is a referendum on how we, the public, perceive systems — whether political or otherwise — and how such a thing as a perfect system is ultimately unachievable.

As Colin Farrel’s character, DOJ agent Danny Witwer, states, “The system is perfect, I agree. But there’s a flaw; it’s human. It always is.”

PreCrime is made possible through the psychic powers of three “gifted” individuals who come to be known as Precogs. These three individuals can see murders that will inevitably occur in the future. Through these metaphysical visions, PreCrime can track down and stop murders before they ever take place.

But when PreCrime Captain John Anderton sees a vision showing himself committing a murder in less than 36 hours, the system starts to break down like dominos as Anderton tries to escape his inevitable future.

The fact that Anderton can see himself committing a crime in the first place is the first flaw we witness in the film. Since you have to have someone monitoring the Precog visions, if one of the people watching the images is the perpetrator, then you create an inevitable paradox. Therefore, the first flaw is having humans review the future because we can’t see the future without automatically altering it. In the far worse but relevant film, Paycheck, Ben Affleck’s character states, “If you show someone their future, they have no future.”

After escaping from Witwer, Anderton seeks out PreCrime creator, Dr. Iris Hineman, for help to clear his name. Thinking that Witwer faked the prevision showing him killing a man named Leo Crow, Anderton believes that maybe Hineman knows how someone could hack the system, but to his dismay, Hineman informs Anderton that, “The Precogs are never wrong.”

But as the conversation unfolds, Anderton begins to understand that the Precogs never had a say in their fate and that they were innocent human children right up until the point that they were subjugated into the PreCrime system. Hineman astutely calls them, “The innocents we now use to stop the guilty.”

This is the second and most fundamental flaw. For the system to work, it required stripping three individuals of due process and human rights.

In the world of Minority Report, I’m sure that some court somewhere classified these psychic beings as something other than human to get around the law regarding their pesky rights as human beings.

This idea lends itself to ancient and modern-day dilemmas such as abortion. By classifying a fetus as something other than human, we inevitably don’t need to extend human rights to such an un-human creature. As such we can do with the fetus as we see fit. Hineman puts it perfectly when she states, “But it doesn’t matter. It’s a perfect system now, isn’t it?”

So the second flaw is the stripping away of human rights from those who deserve it the most.

The next thing that Anderton learns is that the three Precog’s visions don’t always match, creating a discrepancy in the validity of their visions. Whenever there is a dissent, it is always Agatha who disagrees with the twins because she is the stronger of the three. Whenever there is a dissenting opinion, they call it a Minority Report and erase it so as not to cause confusion and public scrutiny.

The Minority Report itself is the third flaw. And since Minority Report is the title of the film, it’s the most misleading out of the bunch.

Believing that he must have a dissenting opinion — and therefore an alternate future — Anderton sets off to kidnap Agatha to retrieve what he thinks is his Minority Report.

Of course, when he sees the vision in its raw form, Anderton realizes that Agatha’s account matches the other two and that he doesn’t in fact have an alternate future like he was led to believe.

But of course, the third flaw is the fact that alternate visions exist in the first place, which throws the entire system off balance.

The fourth flaw arises when DOJ agent, Danny Witwer, discovers a way that a person could duplicate a murder. He learns that sometimes Precogs see echos of past murders, and whenever an echo appears, PreCrime erases them thinking the echos to be irrelevant.

He posits that someone could reenact the murder if someone saw the prevision, and — wearing the same clothes — duplicated the murder in the exact same way.

When he presents his findings to Director Lamar Burgess, the director asks him an interesting question. “Do you know what I hear? Nothing. No footsteps up the stairs, no hovercraft out the window, no clickety-click of little spiders. Do you know why I can’t hear any of those things, Danny? Because right now, the precogs can’t see a thing.”

And then Burgess of course kills Witwer, the DOJ agent having discovered his secret.

This is the fifth flaw. Without all three precogs, the other two can’t see the future. For anyone who knows this information, they could potentially exploit the system if they knew when and how the precogs were able to receive their futuristic visions.

This also makes it unclear what would happen once the three precogs die. Would they go on merely pretending that they could see the future, or would they create new programs to develop new psychics that they could then twist into precogs?

The sixth flaw has everything to do with the general theme of the film about free will vs. determinism. When Anderton finds the hotel room where Leo Crow is staying, he is surprised to find a picture of his son, Sean, on the hotel bed. Realizing that this is the man that kidnapped his son, Anderton comes to terms with the fact that yes, he is indeed going to kill this man, just as the visions foretold.

But then Agatha says something very interesting. She says, “You still have a choice. The others never saw their future.”

The paradox of seeing the future is that once you see it, doesn’t that change the future? How many of the potential criminals that PreCrime put away could have had alternate futures if they were given the chance to see the precog visions?

I guess what this all boils down to is the fact that as humans, we’re continually searching for the “perfect” system. Whether it’s law enforcement, government, business, or heck, even diets, we’re always waiting for the perfect system to come along to fix our problems.

But as Minority Report points out so effectively is that such a thing as a perfect system can’t exist, because of humanity itself. Chaos and unfairness is a constant factor in our lives, and it’s something that we have to come to terms with.

I’m not saying not to explore systems or that any one system is wrong, even though many are. What I am saying is to never put your full faith behind a system devised by man, because such a thing will be flawed by humanity itself.

Learn to embrace an element of chaos in your life. I recently read a fascinating essay by Brett Mckay from The Art of Manliness about a term called “antifragile.” Being antifragile essentially is the evolution that comes after stoicism, meaning that instead of just enduring chaos and hostility, you learn to grow and develop through times of hardship, becoming more than you were at the beginning of your adversity.

The name of the article is Beyond “Sissy” Resilience: On Becoming Antifragile if you want to give it a read which I would highly recommend.

But getting back to Minority Report, one of the most fascinating things to me about the film is its ending. When it was released, critics slammed the tone of the movie’s optimistic ending, claiming that it didn’t fit with the rest of the film’s noir setting.

This is code, meaning that the ending wasn’t depressing enough in critic-speak.

But such critics missed the point of what the ending actually meant. In the end, after PreCrime gets shut down, Anderton moves on with his life and repairs his relationship with his longsuffering wife after they had been separated for several years.

While it may seem like a sappy Hollywood ending that producers slapped on at the last minute, it’s much deeper than that.

What the ending signifies is that Anderton rediscovered the only system that truly works, because without it, the world would fall into chaos.

While marriage and families aren’t perfect and can even get broken or torn apart, Anderton’s marriage was still the most perfect system he had in his life.

For a time, he had forgotten and abandoned it, but in the end, he placed his faith in something higher than PreCrime. For all its flaws and failures, the bond between parents is the most reliable system humanity has ever created because it’s ruled by love.

Of course, marriage isn’t a perfect system, but as Brad Pitt’s character states in Ad Astra, “We’re all we’ve got.”