Don't Read This If You Intend to Watch Minority Report!


I give it a three out of five stars, maybe a three and a half. I liked it and thought it was clever. I had two main problems, one of which cost the movie a star.

First of all, the movie is set in the year 2054 in DC. How unrealistic! The mistake many sci-fi books and movies make is that they don't ever consider the political situation and trends, nor do they consider infrastructure changes, all they want to do is show off how well they can come up with fancy looking technology. In Minority Report they have these fancy appartments that have tracks for your cars and the car zooms up to your appartment and you step out into you appartment. Also the roads are all configured for these new space age cars, how silly! I've got news for them, do you want to know what 2054 will look like? Look out the window.

Technology changes are not the hard part, they take place at a blistering pace but the infrastructure change regarding roads, cars, buildings, etc will take hundreds of years. There has to be a paradigm shift before politicians begin to appropriate funds for that kind of development and usually it is spurred on by some kind of disaster that prompts a rebuilding effort. Besides, someone always stands to lose money when there are infrastructure changes, which always implies a political fight and compromise. I think we could have such technology by 2054, but it'll take much longer to stick.

The other problem I had was in the story. The Justice dept guy. He apparently was smart enough to reconstruct the unethical dealings of the one guy but was completely unprepared that the guy was going to kill him. How monumentally stupid! That was a major flaw, one which bothered me and forced the removal of a star in the rating.

I did like the fact that it was sci fi without too much sci. I think a good story works in past, present and future without much reference to technology, etc.