Minority Report: Film vs. Short Story Essay -- Movies Comparison Compa

Minority Report: Film vs. Short Story Mutant humans, nicknamed precogs, have visions of future crimes. An entire police force is dedicated to interpreting these visions and catching the future criminals before they commit these foreseen crimes. Commissioner John A. Anderton was the creator of this institution called Precrime in New York City and has a strong pride in his work. Everything had seemed to be a success, there had not been a murder for five years, but it all starts to fall apart when the precogs have a vision of Anderton committing a murder of a man he has never met before, named Leopold Kaplan. The commissioner believes he has been set up by a young man, Ed Witwer, who will be taking Anderton’s place when he retires and also possibly his wife, Lisa. Anderton goes on somewhat of a quest to find out who is behind all of this. Through his quest he discovers that the strongest precog, which is the female named Donna, sometimes has different visions than the other two male precogs. These are cal led minority reports, and Anderton finds that he does not have one. He finally finds who is behind his setup, and it is Kaplan, a retired Army General and the man he is supposed to murder. Kaplan had a plan to bring down the Precrime system by keeping Anderton from killing him even though the precogs had envisioned that Anderton would kill Kaplan. In the end, Anderton does kill Kaplan to prove the system still works and Precrime continues (Dick, 1987). This concept of Precrime was created in a short story entitled The Minority Report by Philip K. Dick. Fourty-six years after Dick wrote this story in 2002, Steven Spielberg directed the film Minority Report based on Dick’s story starring Tom Cruise. There are many dif... ... gave necessary information about them to the movie audience. Emotion was brought in with the kidnapping of Anderton’s son and that event being used to drive him to murder was a concept that everyone could relate to. The action of Anderton running from his capture and unfolding who was behind his downfall kept getting better and better, he went as far as removing his eyes and kidnapping a precog. The film followed the same basic structure of the story, but changed certain parts and involved twists to make the story enticing to the variety of audiences across the globe. Bibliography Dick, Philip A. The Minority Report: And Other Classic Stories. New York: Kensington Publishing Corp., 1987 Minority Report. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perf. Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton. Twentieth Century Fox, DreamWorks, 2002.