Summary
We witness a brutal attack, as if through flashback or premonition. A woman submerged in a pool of water is having the premonition and simply says, "Murder," as a machine reveals the identities of the murder victims. The same piece of technology that determined the victims of the murder identifies the perpetrator as a man named Howard Marks. We are in the "Department of PreCrime" in Washington, D.C. sometime in the future. Chief John Anderton walks into his office.
John asks a coworker named Jad what's new in the office, and Jad tells him they've received a "red ball" (the prophetic technology that identifies the victims and perpetrators) and that it's predicted a double homicide, a man and a woman. The killer is a white man in his 40s, but the location is still unclear. John looks at the predictive red balls, then goes and talks to his detectives, a group of people called "Precogs" who are submerged in water and tasked with predicting and prophesying crime. He then talks to two witnesses who confirm that the prediction is correct. The time of the murder is 8:04—24 minutes from now—and John stands in front of a piece of technology and watches the prediction of the murder on a screen of sorts, as classical music plays.
We see Howard Marks, the murderer, coming out his front door and picking up a newspaper. Across the street a man watches him. Inside, Howard's wife cuts eye holes in a picture of Abraham Lincoln's face for their son's school project and Howard comments on the fact that the man in the park across the street looks familiar. "How can you even tell? You know how blind you are without your glasses," his wife says, and Howard says he left his glasses in the bedroom. Suddenly time jumps ahead and we see Howard putting on his glasses before brutally stabbing his wife in the chest.
John analyzes all of the predictive data at hand, looking at the different elements on the screen, trying to find evidence of an address. When they finally find one, we see Howard saying to his wife that he could skip work, and proposing a lunch date. She declines, because she has to go to an open house.
As John runs out of his office to go apprehend the murder, Jad stops him and tells him that the location of the murder seems to have changed. With 13 minutes until the murder, John acts quickly. A man who works for the federal government, Danny Witwer, introduces himself to John, who dismisses him to work more on the Howard Marks case. Another employee, Fletcher, pulls Danny aside to talk him through what John is doing. He points to the "detectives," lying in the water and producing the images that are bringing John all his evidence, ghostly figures with their brains connected to the main computer.
Danny asks Fletcher why the case John is working on is so last minute if the "Precogs" can predict events 4 days in advance. Fletcher tells him that this is what is known as a "Red Ball," a crime of passion in which there is no premeditation. "We rarely see anything with premeditation," Fletcher tells him, implying that with the advancement of precog technology, murderers know that they will be apprehended sooner if they premeditate.
With 10 minutes to go, John looks meticulously at one of the images from the precog data and recognizes the park. He rushes off to Barnaby Woods to stop the murder, brandishing a gun as he leaves.
We see Howard Marks at home drinking orange juice and leaving the house. We then see John and some others getting into a futuristic transportation device to get to Barnaby Woods faster. Waiting outside his house, Howard watches the man from the park go into his house to have an affair with his wife. He follows the man in, then grabs the scissors his wife was using from the kitchen table. Howard goes upstairs with the scissors and watches as his wife begins kissing and having sex with the man. He sits down beside the bed and cries.
Outside, John and the team assess all the houses, unable to determine which one is Howard's house. As Howard's wife and the man with whom she's having an affair come to the bed, Howard sits beside it unseen. John calls to Jad to see if Howard Marks closed the front door in order to assess which house it is. John runs into the house with 30 seconds to go. He runs into the bedroom just as Howard is about to stab his wife, and holds him back as the rest of the team comes in. They arrest Howard for "future murder."
We see the precogs lying in their tank processing the event. Danny asks why they are acting as though the murder is happening, and Jad tells him that it's just "Precog deja vu." The Precogs stop flinching in the tank, as the scene shifts to a commercial for PreCrime services. We see Lamar Burgess, the director of PreCrime, speaking to a group and boasting that there hasn't been a single murder since PreCrime began.
John runs through the city, and into a dark alley where he buys some "new clarity," a futuristic kind of drug, from a blind man named Lycon. John arrives home to an empty apartment. It's a mess, and we see a bunch of newspaper articles about missing children on his bedside table. He then goes through some home videos, looking for clues about the disappearance of his son, Sean. The video he watches depicts Sean asking him how to run faster, and John talks to his son as if he's there.
After turning off the movie, John takes some of the drug he bought from Lycon and watches another movie, this time of his wife, Lara, who left him. He smiles at the image of his wife, when suddenly the movie abruptly ends.
The next day, John runs into Lamar Burgess, the head of the company, who tells him that the company's future is in jeopardy, and that the government is keeping tabs on them. He asks John to keep an eye on Danny Witwer, a representative from the government.
In the office, Fletcher tells Danny all about the technology they use, and Danny is skeptical because they are "arresting individuals who have broken no law." Fletcher defends the operation, insisting that, because they use "metaphysics," the Precogs are never wrong. "It's not the future if you stop it, isn't that a fundamental paradox?" Danny asks. John enters and questions Danny about his thoughts on predetermination, and demonstrating his point by throwing a ball towards Danny. When Danny catches it, sure that it would have fallen had he not, John makes the point, "The fact that you prevented it from happening doesn't change the fact that it was going to happen."
Danny isn't convinced and asks if they've ever encountered people who intended to kill but never did. "The Precogs don't see what you intend to do, only what you will do," John tells him, even though the Precogs cannot see assaults, rapes, or suicides. "There's nothing more destructive to the metaphysical fabric that binds us than the untimely murder of one human being by another," Fletcher adds, quoting Iris Hineman, the woman who developed the Precogs.
Danny wants to talk to the Precogs, but John assures him that that's not allowed. When Danny produces a warrant, John has no choice but to show Danny the Precogs.
Danny meets the Precogs, led by John into the room. The man who is in charge of the Precogs tells them that he cannot touch them, and warns them to be quiet, as the Precogs are sleeping. On Danny's prompting, the man tells them how Precogs work, identifying the female Precog as Agatha, and the twins as Arthur and Dashiell. "We see what they say," he tells them.
Danny ponders the Precogs, saying, "Science has stolen most of our miracles. In a way, they give us of hope of the existence of the divine." He notes that the process is almost religious, but John insists that it's purely scientific, and gets annoyed when he sees his coworkers agreeing with Danny's assessment of their work as somehow in touch with the divine. "We're more like clergy than cops," Jad says, which frustrates John. He dismisses his coworkers and talks to Danny alone.
Danny tells John that he spent time at a Seminary before becoming a cop. He then references the fact that John's child went missing "in such a public place." Growing impatient at the prying, John asks Danny what he's looking for, insisting that the system is perfect and there hasn't been a murder in a long time. "If there's a flaw, it's human," Danny tells him, leaving the Precog tank.
John looks in the tank and waves to Agatha, trying to get her attention. Suddenly, she grabs him and pulls him towards her, whispering in his ear, "Can you see?" and bringing his attention to a premonition she's having, projected on the ceiling above. She drifts back into the water, as the man in charge of the Precogs asks what happened. When John tells him that Agatha grabbed him, he doesn't believe it, since Precogs aren't supposed to be aware of humans.
Analysis
Minority Report takes place in the future, and wastes no time in dropping the viewer down in an obviously different modern world. While the clothes and the buildings are not particularly different from what we expect to see in a contemporary film, the very first shots are of a water-submerged prophet/detective anticipating the murder of a woman by her husband. The imagery is filtered through a futuristic green color, projected onto a screen in a large office. These subtle design elements signal that we are in the future, even if the world is not particularly different from our own.
The premise of the film is an intriguing one, in that it imagines a world in which people might be able to predict horrible events before they happen. What might the law do differently if it had access to prophecy, the film asks, before we even know anything about the central characters. In true sci-fi fashion, a hypothetical question of what the future might be like is at the center of the narrative, and it is at once alluring and terrifying. While the promise of being able to see the future is an attractive one in some ways, it also creates a tremor of anxiety and higher stakes. The promise of knowing about bad things before they happen is enough to drive someone crazy.
The protagonist and the man who seems to bear the burden of future knowledge is the ambitious and salty John Anderton. John is charming with people he respects, but when he is on a job, he becomes focused and intense, and bucks the limitations that authority puts on him. In this way he is the perfect neo-noir hero, in that he is iconoclastic, slightly antisocial, and frighteningly good at his job. Heroes of film noir of the past such as Humphrey Bogart represented a solid, unflinching masculinity, and the figure of John Anderton extends this tradition into the neo-noir tradition. The only difference is, instead of cigarettes and handguns, he has prophetic computers and spacey action suits.
While John is immensely competent at his job, he is also deeply flawed and haunted by his past, another typical scenario in the noir genre. Since the disappearance of his son, Sean, and his separation from his wife, Lara, John has become a reclusive drug addict. When he's not at work, he is at home taking a mysterious drug called clarity and soaking himself in lost images of the past. His ailment is that he is caught up in nostalgia and cannot move on from the happy life he once had. A true lone wolf, he wants so badly to feel connected to other people and the world around him, but he is caught in a cycle of self-harm and avoidance, typified by his reliance on the substance to which he's addicted.
Embedded in the intriguing speculative premise of the film is a philosophical question, which the characters debate in a scene at the PreCrime office. Danny, the supervisor from the government, wants to know how the PreCrime division can be sure that the crimes they are preventing were definitely going to occur. John insists that there are certain things that we just know are going to happen, and that the Precogs were developed in such a way that they will never make errors in prediction. In introducing this debate, the film asks the viewer to question the nature of reality, fate, and inevitability. Is free will predictable in any way? Can human behavior be anticipated, or are all events by chance? Danny and his supervisors have questions about whether metaphysics can ever explain the outcome of events, and whether events are ever predetermined. This conversation, and the tension between the two views about fate vs. freewill, anticipate the main conflict of the film, which will be introduced shortly.
