Notes:
Took the time to watch this movie ... simply because the environment’s too noisy for me to concentrate even when I am wearing my headphone, which is one of the biggest disadvantages of Spring Festival I might add. The storyline is good (in the sense that it is extremely unpredictable) and it also raises some debatable issues concerning the ethics of precognition. Nevertheless, there are certain elements in the movie which I don't quite hold with...
Overall recommended as a science fiction film.
Rating:
8 / 10
Comments: (Possible Spoilers)
The movie is based on a rather old cliché: Whether a human being is capable of changing the future that has been foretold. As the story usually goes, the problem is that people – after being told of what they are supposed to do – usually end up doing the exact things, because their very attempts to alter their future would set off a specific set of events which in turn help bring the vision to fruition. In other words, our endeavor changes the path we walk but can never change our destiny… Or can it?
This is exactly what the movie questions us. The belief that the future can be foretold leads to the development of the system Precrime, which is used to prevent any murder attempts by using the visions obtained from the three Pre-Cogs. John Anderton, the person in charge of the system, suddenly finds himself being foretold to kill a person whom he has never met before. Desperate to prove himself innocent, he made the decision to escape and find the Minority Report, the only hope left to him...
However the movie goes one step further to reveal that one of the Precrime’s inventors, Lamar Burgess, was setting John up because John had found a flaw in Precrime system – a flaw that allowed Lamar to commit murder despite the existence of Precrime, – and for no other reason than to keep the Precrime system he brought up intact. Everything evil he had done had been for Precrime, to prove the infallibility of the system, to rid this world of murder – and yet in the end, when he’s facing John alone on the platform, he realized that the very acts he committed were proof that the system is fallible, that no matter how the future might be seen and interpreted, the end is still alternative – all because the power of decision lies in the hands of human beings, and not in visions foretold by oracles.
Reasoning brings us to the choice that is obvious.
Yet it is the heart’s conviction that persists beyond logic and reasoning, that gives us the strength to make the right choice.
Quotes:
The oracle isn’t where the power is, anyway. The power’s always been with the priests, even if they had to invent the oracle.
(Danny Witner, representative sent by the attorney general to inspect the Precrime units)
"Except… you know your own future, which means you can change it if you want to."
(John Anderton to Lamar Burgess, in the final confrontation)
*
P.S., A side note, can we really trust our reasoning faculty? When and on what conditions? Hmm...