Summary
At PreCrime, Fletcher, Danny, and Jad review the information about the Leo Crow murder. They have identified the location as public housing of some kind, and have noted that in the premonition, John and Leo Crow are standing inside, while an unidentified man is standing outside the window. "There's thousands of houses like this, but he doesn't go there to kill Crow for another 22 hours," Danny notes.
Danny orders his associates to keep their eyes on an area called "the sprawl," where there aren't as many scanners to identify him. As he gives orders, Danny notices a strange data chip in John's desk, then sees a framed photo of John's wife and son. "Where is she?" Danny asks them, referring to Lara.
Meanwhile, John goes to a sketchy doctor to get his irises replaced so that he will not be identifiable in the system. The doctor sticks him with a needle unexpectedly and John holds him down on a table asking what it is. The doctor insists that it was anesthesia, saying, "You wouldn't break the hand of a violinist before a concert, please relax!" The doctor tells John he'll have to completely remove his eyes and replace them. John wants to keep his old eyes, even if they will be replaced, and the doctor agrees.
As the anesthesia kicks in, the doctor introduces himself as a plastic surgeon that John busted in Baltimore and had imprisoned. "You set your patients on fire," John remembers, suddenly frightened that the doctor is performing surgery on him. He goes under and the doctor does the surgery without hurting John.
Danny visits Lara at her lake house and asks if she's heard from John. When she tells him that she hasn't and she doesn't talk to John anymore, Danny tells her that he's been doing drugs. Lara knows and tells Danny that John has been doing neuroin since they lost their son. Danny refers to the fact that John lost Sean while they were at a public pool, then probes Lara about a statement she made that John tried to kill himself after the FBI found one of their son's sandals.
Lara is angry and insists that John shot the ceiling, telling Danny she regrets ever saying that John attempted suicide. When Danny suggests that Lara left John because he became too committed to PreCrime, she disagrees and says that she left him because John reminded her too much of the tragedy of their lost son.
Back at the doctor's office, the doctor tells John not to take the large bandage covering his eyes off for 12 hours, or else he will go blind. The doctor then shows him a series of ropes connected to the wall that lead to the bathroom and the kitchen. He puts an injection pen and a baggie with John's old eyes in a bag for him, then sets off a timer that will go off when John is allowed to take off the bandages and leave.
John takes some neuroin and goes to sleep, dreaming of his son's disappearance at the public pool. In the dream, John tells Sean that a whale can holds its breath underwater for 20 minutes, and Sean tells him he has to try and beat the whale. John submerges himself underwater, but when he comes back up, Sean has disappeared. John wakes up screaming Sean's name, haunted by the past. He gets up and goes to the refrigerator, where he accidentally picks up and eats a moldy sandwich and sour milk. On the television behind him, we see that the television show Cops is on and that, in a live broadcast, the cops are about to arrest John.
The investigation team arrives at the apartment building where John is staying and begins a scan to find him. They release a number of technological spiders that scurry into the apartment building looking for John. The spiders go into John's room just as he is climbing into a bath to hide from them. When he comes up for air, the spiders pull back his bandages and scan his eyes. Just as Fletcher is following them into the room, they get a report that the person in question is not John; the new eyes worked. Fletcher goes back downstairs.
The next day, Danny points out that there are four people present in the Leo Crow premonition—not three as previously believed. Danny points out that there is a fourth person in the mirror, and it appears to be a woman.
We see a man giving a tour of PreCrime headquarters, telling a group of children that the PreCrime division was established in 2046 and now D.C. is the safest district in America. John walks past the tour in disguise, planning to infiltrate the PreCrime unit and download the minority report from Agatha. John injects himself in the chin with the injection pen that the doctor gave him, which renders him even more unrecognizable. He runs into PreCrime, taking out a baggie of his old eyes and looking at them. John takes the eyes out of the baggie to help him get into the Precog tank, but they roll down the hall and he has to chase after them, catching one just before it falls through a grate.
In the Precog lab, John enlists the help of Wally, the Precog overseer. As Danny looks over the premonition of the Leo Crow case once again, he identifies the woman in the room as Agatha. "He's coming to get her," Danny realizes, rushing out of the room.
When Danny gets to the Precog "temple," John grabs Agatha and pulls a lever that sucks them both through the floor of the tank. Wally tells Danny that John took Agatha so he can perform all the murders he wants, and that the two other Precogs cannot predict murders if Agatha isn't there.
With 51 minutes until the murder is supposed to take place, Danny orders everyone to work together to find the room where it's supposed to happen.
Analysis
On the run, John must resort to some sketchy options and strategies in order to evade the authorities. First, he must get new irises to evade the scanning systems set in place by the government. The operating doctor and his assistant are creepy people, and it is not until John is under anesthesia that he realizes the doctor is a plastic surgeon he once put in jail for setting his patients on fire. In spite of the apparent dangers—both given the surgery itself and the relationship between doctor and patient—the doctor spares John and John gets the new eyes he needs.
While the beginning of the film was expositional, with some sporadic moments of suspense, once John is on the run, the pace kicks in to high gear and director Steven Spielberg's facility with high-action adventure comes into full display. In Minority Report, Spielberg's dual talents of building complex and fully realized science fictional worlds and keeping the pace and plot exciting and consuming come into harmony. Between the high impact action sequences, in which the astoundingly competent John must wriggle out of seemingly unbeatable situations, and the psychologically and philosophically weighted scenes in which John must contend with another difficult truth of the corrupt system of which he is part, Spielberg keeps the viewer enthralled to the twists and turns of the plot.
In this section, we learn more about John's past, particularly when Danny goes to visit John's wife, Lara, at her home. Danny baits Lara in various ways, suggesting that John was the reason their son went missing, that John attempted suicide, and that she left him because he became obsessed with PreCrime and was not committed to the relationship. The years have softened Lara's position, and she insists that John is not to blame for the course of events that took place. In her refusal to place blame on her husband, Lara echoes a theme of the film more broadl: that some events are simply accidents, that not every tragedy is someone's fault.
The film is jam-packed with suspenseful sequences, and even small, seemingly innocuous events have a surreal and unsettling effect. Suspense is built when the doctor reveals himself to have a reason to hurt John after John has been put under anesthesia. While in the end the doctor does not hurt John, the viewer is meant to wonder whether John will make it out of surgery alive, which adds a layer of suspense to the narrative. Then, when John wakes up from surgery, he goes to the fridge for some food, but picks up a horribly moldy sandwich instead of the nice sandwich on the shelf beneath. While the suspense of seeing a character unknowingly eat mold is not on the same level of seeing a character evade a near-death experience, the inclusion of this disgusting detail only unsettles the viewer more, pulling them into the narrative and aligning them with John's plight.
For every moment that it seems like John will not be able to wiggle out of the dilemma in which he's found himself, we find him able to do just that. Every near-disaster ends with an impressive escape or save, which is part of what keeps the action so compelling. This recurring structure, of suspense and relief, comes to a head when John manages to escape with Agatha. Just as Danny smashes the window into the "Temple," John pulls a lever which miraculously flushes him and Agatha out of the building to safety. While at times the means of escape seems implausible, the structure is such that the viewer barely has time to wonder about realism, swept along by the current of the plot.
