Same general area, 1999: a huge lizard is stomping down the street…
…and doesn’t set off any car alarms.
Darn, I was going to check the year before I submit. Make that '98.
I somehow find it far easier to suspend disbelief for western superhero movies like Spiderman or X-men than eastern martial arts like Crouching Tiger Hidden Wires, go figure.
Sorry, but Sactown ain’t gonna help with this one. It has an international airport, then within city limits you have McClellan AFB, Mather AFB (which had SAC for years, and the runways accomodate B-52s), Aerojet, several private airports and long sections of I-80 and I-50 which are four lanes wide and don’t have so much as a degree of curve to them for miles. Then you have Oakland International and SFO within a hundred miles, San Jose, Stockton, Fresno–all with good sized airstrips if not full on jet runways and all of it within about fifteen minutes air travel time.
Now PORTLAND, on the other hand, would be a great candidate for this scenario. All you’ve got is Sea-Tac within 200 miles, the roads are narrow and curvy and the few Air Force installations are right next to the only airports. It could have been really scenic, too, having all the planes circling in an ice storm then crashing into the lava dome of Mt. St. Helens–that would be cool!
To me the main problem of the whole movie was the premise itself.
I get the idea of preventing murders by using “pre-cogs”. What I don’t get, however, is what happens afterwards to the would-be murderers. I mean, the one legitimate arrest they show is clearly a spur-of-the-moment murder. If you gave the guy a day to think about what he almost did, he’d probably regret it and never do it again. So, what do you gain by freezing him forever?
The unstinting support of the law & order at any cost crowd. Max von Sydnow’c character said that there had been exactly zero successful murders since pre-crime began, so clearly the certainty of being punished had completely deterred the premeditated murderers too.
Not quite. Off the top of my head, McChord AFB in Tacoma, Boeing Field in Seattle, Paine Field in Everett, and Grant County Airport in Moses Lake, Washington (main runway is 13,500 feet long and 200 feet wide, it was an alternate landing site for the space shuttle).
Well, that’s part of the point isn’t it? They have an incredibly successful program (I mean, right from the start they have had 100% success). They don’t really need to have any kind of deterrence on top of it, unless they’re really lazy.
Add to this the improbability of this 100% success rate. After all, the only murder prevention we are allowed to watch narrowly succeeds.
No, because the success of the deterrence depends on the continuation of the program. And how is it lazy to keep working.
(Not that I’m depending Pre-Crime; I’m with Colin Farrell’s character in thinking that it’s fundamentally unjust.)
Yes, because there’s so little warning in impulse murders. What Pre-Crime has done is to completely discourage planned murders. If Arye Gross’ character–the husband at the beginning whom Pre-Crime captures–had discovered his wife’s infidelity in a less dramatic fashion and entertained thoughts of killing her and her lover by poison, say, or sabotaging their car–some way that is used in the real world, in other words–he’d probably think, “No, I can’t possibly get away with it because of Pre-Crime.” If he didn’t, if he decided to ride the whirlwind and continue with his murder preparations, then during the time he was plotting he’d have been caught.
No, I can’t explain why Max Von Sydow’s character is able to conceal his intricate plot in this case. I didn’t say the story made sense.
But if detection is 100% effective there’s absolutely no need for harsh punishment. And certainly no need to freeze people forever without trial. What about a stay in a psychiatric hospital?
As you say, the only possible murders in Minority Report are impulse murders. Say the penalty for murder is 1 year in a country club style prison. That’s not enough to deter someone who is determined to commit murder. So they decide to go through with it. Except pre-crime would detect the murder and arrest them before they could go through with it. Except the pre-murderer knows that they won’t be able to actually commit the murder, and so they decide not to even try. And so pre-crime doesn’t have to stop the murder.
There’s absolutely no need for harsh punishment…heck ANY punishment…for pre-murder. The mere fact that you will be prevented from carrying out the murder is enough disinincentive for all premeditated murders. And for impulse murderers the punishment is irrelevant anyway.
Let’s not romanticize the Native American. While the Lakaota might not have had a police force or jails you’d be mistaken to think they didn’t have a set of rules everyone was suppose to live by and methods to punish those who were anti-social. Also, the Lakota made it a habit of raiding other groups for horses and they weren’t necessarily motiviated primarily by their need for more horses.
Likewise I remember seeing a movie in anthropology about a group of San who had a major conflict because one member of the group had more blankets then another. They accursed her of cheating on her husband and called her daughter a whore.
I’m not saying these people are bad but let’s not view them with such rosey glasses.
Marc
Odd you should mention Grant County Airport in the context of answering the question related to Die Hard 2 since that’s where they shot the scene with the conspicuously out of place PNB pay phone.
I haven’t seen Minority Report recently but wasn’t it due to the fact he mostly used third parties to murder people (something the Pre-Crime system didn’t account for)?
I knew about the phone, but didn’t know it was shot at Moses Lake. Cool. Checking IMDB, there are 13 filming locations listed for Die Hard 2, not bad for a movie where all the action takes place at one airport.
And don’t change my spelling.
May I please use that as a screen name? 
I irrevocably ruin sci-fi for me and my friends. As a geek who knows quite a few random trivia about chemistry, physics, math, and technology, it irks me to know end the awful awful premeses some of the shows that people come up with.
Although I guess expecting the creators of Mega Man Battle Network to know how the real internet works is probably expecting too much. 
That’s unlikely. The average personality of SF officers may deviate from the overall population, but surely their attitudes reflect the population at large. You don’t expect the Enterprise crew chosen from the egalitarian society of 24C Earth to all just hapen to tilt to some sort of self-evident universal morality.
Think of that as going to the park/movies. Most of the 1,000+ poeple on the Enterprise won’t/can’t go to one of the ?4-5? holodecks everyday. What’s the entertainment when one is loafing around on the couch after-shift? It’s highly improbable that television, radio have been phased out.
The PD only applies to sub-Warp cultures, otherwise ‘First contact’ would never happen, so liability concerns aren’t the reason.
Actually, I now regret not naming it Ranger Johnny MacGuffin And His Fuckup Squad. A bit more action-flavored, doncha’ think?
I think it was something like that–he would see how the murders were to be played out, so then he would perform the murders in the same fashion–Pre-crime picked up the pre-cognition of the crime as he committed it, but dismissed it as just the after-effects of seeing the original play-out since the images looked almost identical. The third party got caught, but he didn’t because the system never realised they were picking up two different versions of the same murder.
As I’ve gotten older The Magic Schoolbus has started to bother me. It’s not the impossibility of an actual magic bus, or an intelligant lizard, or anything like that…but what the heck kind of school do those kids go to to have a class size of 8?
In The Pre-History of The Far Side Gary also points out that he drew bananas growing downward, opposite of the way they actually do.
(Oh, and the caption on the mosquito panel was “What a day…I must have spread malaria across half the country.”)
knock yerself out. 