Summary
John goes to talk with Gideon, the "Sentry." Gideon presides over the prisoners—the would-be criminals locked up by PreCrime—and plays the organ for them to "relax" them. John wants to know more about a murder case concerning a drowning of a white woman. Looking at some of the records, John recognizes the footage of the case he's looking for; it's one of the first cases that the PreCrime Division ever investigated. Gideon tells John that the footage on the screen is "a combined data stream based on all three previsions" from the 3 different Precogs.
"Just show me Agatha's data stream," John requests, and Gideon takes him on a "ride" and they go look at various murder cases. The prisoners are locked into pods that float around the room, and are unconscious. They come to the murderer in the drowning incident, and Gideon reports that "he drowned a woman named Anne Lively out at Roland Lake."
Gideon tells John that the murderer was never ID'd, that he is still what is referred to as a "John Doe." When John asks him why he was never identified, Gideon tells him that the murderer swapped out his eyes in order to fool the scanners; "you can get it done on the street for a few thousand bucks these days," he says. They try to look at Agatha's premonition, but no data comes up, which surprises Gideon.
John wants to know more about Anne Lively, the intended victim of the drowning, and Gideon tells him she's a "neuroin addict," like the killer, but that she went to rehab and cleaned up. When they try and figure out where she is now, there is again no data. John takes the data chip about Anne Lively from the machine, even though Gideon warns him this is against the rules.
John brings the data on Anne Lively to Lamar Burgess, the director of the operation, and tells him that Agatha's data is missing, and that a great deal of data is curiously missing as well. Burgess tells John that his ex-wife, Lara called him and is worried about John. "Frankly so am I," says Burgess, referring to John's drug habit, but John insists that he's fine.
Burgess frets that the government is going to scoop up the PreCrime Division, and tells John, "My father once told me, 'You don't choose the things you believe in. They choose you.' There's a reason you're here, John. Had PreCrime been in place just 6 months earlier, the loss you and Lara suffered would have been prevented." Burgess coughs and reminds John that the nation is looking closely at PreCrime's actions, and that John's "pain," his reliance on drugs, will hurt the organization. John looks at him seriously and simply says, "They're not gonna take it away from us, I won't let them."
Danny Witwer looks around John's messy apartment during the day, finding the drugs that John takes and saying "Bingo." He then watches one of John's videos, pleased at having found John's secret.
Agatha emerges from the water in the tank and a brown ball falls out of the machine, with the name "Leo Crow." The predicted victim is a man and because the ball is brown, they know that it's premeditated. John and Jad lock in some witnesses and begin the processes of locating the murder site. In the premonitions, John sees an older woman smoking a pipe, two figures in a room, and a "third party": a man wearing sunglasses outside the window. All of a sudden, another projection appears and we see an image of John killing Leo Crow.
John is shocked, but does not tell Jad what he saw. When a brown ball that bears the name of the murderer comes out of the machine (presumably bearing John's name), he grabs the ball before Jad can take it, and asks Jad to go get him a piece of cake. When Jad is gone, John looks at the ball, which indeed bears his name. He drops the ball and watches the premonition which shows him to be the murderer, watching the moment of him shooting the man over and over again.
After watching the footage, he looks down at the man who presides over the Precogs, who says he will give him two minutes before he hits the alarm. John walks briskly out of the PreCrime division and gets in an elevator. Just as the doors are closing, Danny Witwer gets on and confronts John about the drugs he found. Convinced Danny is the one who set him up, John pins him up against the wall of the elevator and puts a gun to his head. Danny merely smirks and holds up the drugs, telling John that he's going to lose his badge and get put in jail for 6 months for possession. "Now put the gun down, John, I don't hear a red ball," Danny says, just as the alarm goes off. John gets off the elevator and runs.
As John drives away from headquarters, he calls Burgess, screaming that Danny set him up. When Burgess wants to know who the victim is, John tells him it's "Leo Crow," a man he doesn't even know but is projected to kill in less than 36 hours. Burgess has no idea how Danny could have framed him, and asks him to have security check to see if Danny ever entered after hours. Burgess offers for John to come to his house, telling him he cannot run, but John has other ideas, and breaks out of his vehicle to jump onto another one, jumping from vehicle to vehicle, then finally into a room where a group of women are doing a yoga-like exercise.
Danny visits Burgess' office and asks about Burgess' meeting with John the previous day before he got "tagged." Burgess tells him they talked about the Mets. When Burgess doesn't give him any more information, Danny threatens to call the Attorney General. "I don't want John Anderton hurt," Burgess says, threateningly, and Danny leaves.
John walks through a lobby filled with advertisements. In the future, the advertisements all identify people by name, and John looks anxiously over his shoulder, sure that the advertisements will act as surveillance for the authorities who are searching for him. People are identified by their eyes, and as John walks with a crowd, a camera above them identifies him, alerting the PreCrime office. Danny and Fletcher go to apprehend him.
On the train, a man reads a newspaper article about John and looks over at him suspiciously. When John gets off the train, he sees a group of cops ready to arrest him and makes a run for it. Before he can get away, Fletcher and the others corner him. Fletcher tells him not to run, but John keeps saying, "Everybody runs." As they push him up against a window, a barking dog pops up startling everyone, and John fends them off and climbs a fence, making yet another escape.
After fending off the cops in a dramatic action sequence, John escapes through an apartment building. Outside the apartment, he runs into Danny Witwer, who chases John on foot through an industrial warehouse. The two men get in a fist fight, and John manages to escape by climbing inside a vehicle that is being constructed in the warehouse. Once the vehicle, a sleek red car, has been built, John drives away, escaping his captors once and for all.
John drives through the country and into a forest, past a sign that wards off trespassers. He arrives at the house of Iris Hineman, the creator of the Precogs. After wriggling away from some vines that seek to ensnare him, John wanders up to Iris' greenhouse, where he finds her tending to some plants. "You're trespassing," she says immediately, before noting the injury he suffered from her vine, which is meant to keep trespassers away. When she refers to him by name, John is surprised to realize that Iris Hineman knows who he is. "I'm not a killer," he says. She fixes him some tea to counteract the poison from the plant.
John asks Iris how someone might fake a prevision, but she insists that she has no idea. When he questions her about her connection to PreCrime, she insists that the Precogs were a result of a science experiment gone wrong, that she was "trying to heal them, not turn them into something else." She explains that she was treating children of drug addicts at a clinic 10 years ago, "when neuroin first hit the streets," and that most of the children were born with brain damage and died before turning 12, but that the Precogs are the surviving children. The children dreamt only of murder, she tells him, and the dreams were prophetic.
As Iris goes back to watering her plants, John confronts her, insisting that he doesn't know the man he's supposed to kill. She replies, "And yet a chain of events has started, a chain that will lead you inexorably to his murder." She then reveals that the Precogs sometimes disagree, which startles John, who wants to know why he's never been alerted to this fact. Laughing, Iris tells him that the data for ambiguous cases is destroyed by the organization to cover up any hint of fallibility. These ambiguous cases are known as "minority reports," and Iris tells him that Burgess knows about this occurrence.
John is incensed that he has been locking up potentially innocent people. Iris advises him to trust no one and to seek out the minority report. While the record of the minority report will have been destroyed, Iris tells him, the original report still exists, in a safe place that Iris created herself. When John asks her where it's stored, she kisses him and tells him that it's inside the Precog that predicted it; "all you have to do is download it, darling," she whispers. John fears that to get back into Precrime would be impossible, but Iris insists that it is the only way, telling him that Agatha is the Precog who always contains the minority report.
Analysis
Matters become more complicated when John goes to look at the data for an old case, the intended drowning of Anne Lively. After breeching the boundary between the human and Precog world by waving his hand above Agatha's face while she's in the tank, John receives an unexpected piece of information. Agatha's "Can you see?" and the projection of Anne Lively's murder onto the ceiling above tips John off to the fact that there might be some unfinished business with the case. Like a true noir hero, John doesn't always play by the rules, but this is what makes him such a skilled investigator.
A major theme in the film is the interplay between the future and the past. The PreCrime division is devoted to looking into the future to see what could potentially happen, which stirs up controversy with the Justice Department (represented by Danny Witwer), which is concerned about how accurate these predictive technologies are. Meanwhile, John is enamored of the past. On a personal level, he spends all of his time not at the office going over old home videos and reliving intimacy with his wife and his missing son. At work, he goes snooping around the case of Anne Lively, and Gideon warns him, "Dig up the past, all you get is dirty." The demons that John is contending with are coming at him from both sides, from both the future and the past.
Connecting John's past to his future is his sense that things happen for a reason, a sentiment echoed by his mentor and boss, Lamar Burgess. After finding the missing data in the Anne Lively case, John goes to visit Burgess, who tells him something his father told him: "You don't choose the things you believe in, they choose you." Here, Burgess is referring to the fact that John started working for the PreCrime division right after the disappearance of his son, an event that the department might have prevented. Haunted by the past and the potential future, John chooses to believe in his power in the present, his ability to effect change in his immediate world as a PreCrime detective.
A huge plot twist occurs in this section when John investigates a premeditated murder and finds out that he is the murderer. The viewer feels the tension of the moment as John goes from thinking he is just investigating like normal to experiencing disbelief and horror when he sees his own image on the screen, shooting Leo Crow. This plot twist contributes to the contradictions of John's character. While he is the most skilled investigator in the PreCrime division, he has his darker sides, his edges, and when he sees his own image in the premonition, he must grapple with the question of whether or not he trusts himself. In true noir fashion, the protagonist must come to grips not only with the villainy of others, but with his own dark side—even if, in this case, he cannot quite understand what's going on.
Just when it seems that John has no hope for survival or redemption, he meets the mysterious Iris Hineman, the woman who developed the Precogs to begin with. Her help is essential, in that she reveals to John that PreCrime is not infallible, that there is something called a minority report, which reveals when the precogs disagree in a premonition and a potential murderer cannot be reliably predicted to act. In his meeting with Iris, John learns that no one can be trusted, that the entire operation of PreCrime is more concerned with the image of the unit than with the accuracy and ethics of its operations. John must become even more of a "lone wolf" when he realizes that his only hope is to break into PreCrime on his own.
