Minority Report: Pre-Crime goes national. How?

Cafe Society
1

While channel surfing the other day I watched a bit of “Minority Report” (for the 600th time :rolleyes: )

One point of the movie was the campaign to take “Pre-crime” national.

Did they ever explain how the 3 pre-cogs were to handle a population of 300+ million people? How were those 3 going to prevent murder throughout the entire nation? Did I miss something?

2

I took it that the Washington set-up was the experimental proto-type, and that they’d have other groups of pre-cogs set up in other parts of the country.

3

I think in the short story, it’s computers, not people who do the work.

4

But even in the movie there’s a good chance they could get others. This precoginition was caused by the effects of some wierd drug on the fetuses in pregnant mothers. There were surely more than just three, given that the precogs came from two mothers in just one psych ward/detox.

5

Yep, what he said. At least, that’s what I always thought.

6

I don’t think that book placed as much value (or even had the story line) about how the female precog was really the key. It was just more about the ethics of arresting someone who hadn’t yet committed a crime. I have it in a book of short stories upstairs so I can double check that later. As far as the film, there was a grim implication that you’d need a steady source of babies born to drug addicts to create the proper precogs.

7

I don’t think the short story concerned itself with the ‘Pre-Crime goes national’ idea. It is set after a huge war and large sections of the country are completly devestated.

The short story was ‘about’ the exact opposite thing that the movie was.

[SPOILERS]
In the short story, Anderson (what ever the Tom Cruise character name was) basically is deciding what is more important. The group or the individual. Is it more important to arrest all potential murders, perhaps unjustly, to save so many people? Is the organization of pre-crime more important than he is. In the short he is set up to make Pre-Crime fail. He realizes this and goes ahead and commits the murder as predicted so that Pre-Crime can continue. In the film there were those people who ‘confirm’ the predictions, it’s one of those people who set him up in the story.
Of course the film’s view is that the individual is more important than the group. So people can now be murdered but Anderson and the pre-cogs are happy.
[/SPOILERS]