Minority Report

Corrected entry: When Anderton is in the car that he has fallen into during the fight, the car is sprayed red while the Pre Crime cops watch the car from behind a screen. The spray guns are all around the car and spraying it with paint, but no paint is seen on the floor or the walls, I can only assume this is a special kind of paint that Dulux will invent eventually.

Correction: It's magnetically charged paint. It already exists. The paint particles are charged as they exit the nozzle, and are attracted to only the metal of the car, which is also magnetically charged.

Corrected entry: It is stated very that the precogs have only a few hours (maybe less) to show a crime of passion since the person committing the crime doesn't know he/she is going to do it. If that logic is followed, and Anderton's crime was predicted over a day in advance, why was Colin Ferrell's character's murder not seen in advance? Agatha is the strongest precog of the three but she was still in the Temple until just a little while before his murder. If Colin Ferrell's murder had been seen, wouldn't that have caused the arrest of Anderton's boss?

Correction: It was a crime of passion that was triggered by Whitmore revealing that he knew about a high ranking pre-crime detective manipulating the system, which is while Agatha was away.

Corrected entry: When Howard Banks goes into his house to check if his wife is cheating on him, the pre-cogs show that he goes into his house with the door opening on the right side. But when Anderton runs in to stop the murder he rushses through the door with the door opening on the left side.

Correction: When the black guy looks at the image that show the door open, we're looking through the other side of the screen, because it is clear. That makes the image reversed, so the door opens on the correct side.

csteel310

Corrected entry: In the scene where they give a tour to school children they saw pre-crime has been running smoothly for 9 years. Anderton's son has been missing for 6 years why then when John was talking to Burgess did he say if the company would have been around 6 months earlier his son's death would have never happened, when the company had been around 3 years earlier?

Correction: On the school tour the guide actually says "pre-crime began with a government grant 9 years ago". There could have easily been 3 years of research/development before it was put properly in place.

Corrected entry: The police were able to track down John during most of the movie because his eyes were constantly scanned and his location sent to the cops, yet when he uses one of his eyes on the scanner to open the door tn the basement of the pre-crime department, no alarms go off! They were able to track him down all the way to an old delapidating building but not the police station itself?

Correction: The reason why the alarm doesn't go off is because no one is allowed down there anyway, and there's always someone down there, so if anyone came in, he would be able to manually set off the alarm. Also remember at the beginning that when Anderton is giving the tour of the Temple, the system says "Access Denied" to Witwer and no alarm goes off. And also remember, they did NOT track Anderton down to the building. They were only doing a search.

csteel310

Corrected entry: When Anderton is in his car and Precrime finds him the car gets locked down. So he simply kicks out a window and climbs out of the car, but when the camera shows the outside shots of him on the car none of the windows are missing. Some people claim it's just down to the angle, but it's definitely not - watch it closely. He kicks out the window against the direction of travel, and climbs on the roof. The car then starts going vertically (without swivelling round), so in order to stand upright he stands on the window...which he kicked out just before.

Correction: The side which has the kicked out window is facing the vertical highway. The little "hub" that Anderton crawls out of DOES swivel, and the wheels are attached to the highway. I can't imagine anyone going down the highway sidways.

csteel310

Corrected entry: What bothered me in this movie is the 'all or nothing' approach. They stopped using precogs because it wasn't always accurate and they risked arresting an innocent person, and also because of the ethics problem of arresting someone for a crime he didn't yet commit. Even so, couldn't they still use the system as a preventive measure, just stopping the crime without necessarily arresting the suspect? Wouldn't that help prevent dozens of murders per year?

Correction: It would, but the ethical question of imprisoning three people to prevent murders that might happen was just as important. They had to free the precogs for that reason, not just because the system wasn't entirely accurate.

Corrected entry: It is completely illogical that Burgess hires a murderer to kill Ann Lively, knowing that the PreCrime Dept. will arrest him and then shortly after killing her himself. Why not hire a second killer? The effect would have been the same and he wouldn't have risked his own skin.

Correction: Maybe, but there'd be no guaruntee that the second killer wouldn't be arrested as well. Keep in mind that the only reason Burgess is allowed to be anywhere near Anne Lively is because he's the director of Pre-Crime and therefore is above suspicion to his subordinates. Burgess's best bet to successfully kill Lively would be to do it himself since the system he created wouldn't believe him to have any involvement.

Corrected entry: John Anderton (Tom Cruise) visits his ex-wife at her country home. Their son, an only child, was kidnapped and presumably murdered six years earlier. As John and his wife talk in the yard, a tricycle is clearly visible on the lawn. Is the audience to believe that she is so grief-stricken that she has been unable to touch the tricycle for six years?

Correction: That's not unusual. It's the right weather to put it outside, and also it's a memento of their son's.

csteel310

Corrected entry: This really confuses me. The guy who got caught/framed for the murder of the pre-cog's mother was known as "John Doe", because they didn't know his real name. Then what was the name on his ball?

Correction: As stated in one of the other mistakes / corrections, the name of the murderer does not appear on any ball until their face has been seen in the precogs vision. As the murderer was wearing a mask, their face would never have been seen.

Corrected entry: In the film a woman says that she was about to be raped, but was saved, thanks to pre-crime. But later they say that pre-crime can't detect rapes.

Correction: Not by themselves, but if someone was planning on raping and murdering her, then the murder would be detected and stopped, and hence the rape as well. Could well be creative marketing by the people promoting the nationalisation vote.

Corrected entry: When John shows his gun to the hotel clerk he does not pick it up when he goes to catch Agatha and then goes upstairs. How does he manage to shoot Leo without a gun?

Correction: He does grab the gun. You can see it in his right hand when he turns to catch Agatha.

Corrected entry: There is a basic paradox of the vision of the Crow murder. Anyone wonder what brought this vision on? The visions take place when the first "domino" falls in a series of dominos that lead to a murder, days ahead of time for a premeditaded murder or hours or minnutes before for a crime of passion (in the one we see, as soon as the husband gets suspicious the vision occurs). So what triggered this vision? What was the first domino? The paradox is that the vision itself was the first domino. Without the vision there was no reason for Aderton to track down a man named Leo Crow. So the vision somehow triggered itself. And without the vision, Aderton would not have attempted to track Leo Crow and the murder wouldn't have occured.

Correction: The trigger is John seeing Anne Lively's murder, and when he went to check the records on that Lamar decided to hire a man to pretend to be the abducter of John's son finally giving John a victim for the murder he had been planning for years.

Corrected entry: If the Max Von Sydow character had planned on really killing Agatha's Mom after the (also-planned) attempt would be caught by the Pre-Crime Police...wouldn't his actual plan also be seen by the "Pre-Cogs" and shown to the Pre-Crime Police as a "premeditated murder"?

Correction: The pre-cogs sometimes had echoes where they saw the same murder twice. The echos were dismissed because it was understandable that it was the same murder and it was just a glich in the pre-cog's system. The pre-cogs did see Sydow murdering Agatha's mom, but the vision was dismissed, like the other echoes.

Correction: It was seen by the pre-cogs, but as a "minority report." The pre-cog twins Arthur and Dashiell thought that John Doe would kill Anne Lively (Agatha's mom). Agatha had taken into account that John Doe would get caught in time and that Lamar Burgess would kill Anne Lively. Agatha's data-stream was later erased from the prevision archives by Burgess, to cover up his crime; and any subsequent previsions regarding Anne Lively in a similar situation were treated as "echoes", which the technicians were told (by protocols possibly written by Burgess himself) to ignore and erase.

Corrected entry: I've been thinking about this alot, and I've realized that the whole idea of comitting a murder to look like an "echo" after another one wouldn't work. If you think about it, that system would work to cover up the visual part of the premonition, but how would it stop a ball from being created? Burgess definitely planned to kill Anne Lively, so it should have been a brown ball. If you compare his plan to kill Lively to any other murder, than there's really no difference except that he hired someone else to murder her too. Early on in the film, after Anderton throws the ball across the table and Witwer catches it, he mentions that the precogs don't see what you intend to do, only what you do. So if the guys was hired to pretend to kill Lively, the brown ball would have still said Lamar Burgess, the real killer. If the fall guy thought that he was going to kill her, then there would have been two brown balls, one for Lamar and one for him, or one brown ball for the both of them. No matter how you slice it, there should have been a ball. Some people think that the techs would have dismissed it as an echo before it ever got to the ball stage, but there must be a system to identify echoes beyond a tech saying "yeah, that looks the same". The names are clearly innate to the vision, so both visions, however similar they looked would have different murderers attached to them.

Correction: That's a good analyzation, except it's not entirely true. If you think there should be a system to identify whether or not a vision is an echo, well, there isn't. That's the whole reason Lamar Burgess got away with it; he designed the system, and he knew how to manipulate it. And as far as the ball goes, a ball isn't created until a face is clearly seen. (For example, John Anderton's ball isn't created until his face comes into focus.) Burgess wears a mask during the murder, so it's completely plausible that the vison would be dismissed as an echo before a ball is created. If you still don't believe me, notice there was no ball created for the echo of Sarah Marks's murder.

Corrected entry: At the squat where the eye surgery is performed, the lid is left off the ice chest. Yet 6 hours later there is enough unmelted ice to nearly fill the bathtub.

Correction: The ice does not fill the bath, it is clearly floating on the surface. There are also many ice-cube trays from the freezer floating, so there is no doubt more ice from there.

Corrected entry: When the first murder in the film takes place, we see Tom Cruise wondering which one is the house of the man who is about to kill his wife. Since they found the murderer's id in the police station before, shouldn't they know his exact address?

Correction: When John Anderton first begins to leave his assistant comes out stopping him saying 'There is a problem with the address, it is no longer there.' The family had moved within the last week and the system hadn't been updated yet.

Corrected entry: When the pre-cogs see a murder the name of the victim and perpetrator are written on either a red ball, for crime of passion, or on a brown ball, which means the murder was planned. John's name is written on a brown ball, but how could he have planned to kill this man if he never knew him?

Correction: John says that he has thought of only 2 things since his son disappeared....what his son would look like now and what he would do to the man who took him. Presumably, he means that he has been thinking about how he would kill his son's kidnapper for the past 6 years, which means the murder was premeditated.

Correction: John Anderton never premeditated the murder of Leo Crowe, because Leo Crowe isn't the real abductor of Anderton's son to begin with. Moreover, from the actual event (but not from the pre-vision), it's clear that a very emotionally-driven Anderton was going to kill Crowe in a crime of passion, and not just in cold blood. So if we are to categorize Crowe's death as premeditated, the premeditation aspect doesn't come from Anderton, but from someone else. The most viable explanation is that the premeditation comes from Leo Crowe, the victim himself. Leo Crowe's death is a murder with premeditation because Leo Crowe premeditated on getting killed by John Anderton.

Corrected entry: It seems illogical that two computers in the same room would not be networked together in the future. Both computers by the Temple can read from the pre-cogs, but the pre-cops use a person to run across the room with a futuristic disc to transfer information between computers! That doesn't even happen today anymore...

Correction: The computer linked to the pre-cogs is probably isolated so as to not disrupt their brain patterns, and also to avoid any possibility of someone hacking in.

Corrected entry: The pre-cogs can only see murders because they are the most disruptive events, we are told. However, when Anderton and the pre-cog are walking through the mall, she sees trivial things well enough to tell him to take an umbrella, when a guy walking by will drop a briefcase, etc. How do these rate as disruptive enough to be seen?

Correction: The precogs DREAM the murders. They never say that the precogs can't predict anything else. They are kept in a restricted chamber and left in an almost dream-like state all the time so that they are more likely to be dreaming, and therefore, dreaming of murders. The chamber is devoid of stimulation to keep them from focusing on the things around them. Notice that Agatha used her procognitive abilities to recognize Anderton when he entered the room.

Factual error: The time period of the movie is 2054. There is an election day (April 22nd) that is on a billboard and then announced as a Tuesday. However, April 22nd, 2054 is actually on a Wednesday.

More mistakes in Minority Report

Dr. Iris Hineman: Sometimes, in order to see the light, you have to risk the dark.

More quotes from Minority Report

Trivia: Paul Thomas Anderson, who directed Tom Cruise in Magnolia, has a cameo on the train. It is reported that he is so hard to find that Anderson himself does not know where he appears.

More trivia for Minority Report

Question: Why all the build up of John having sent the Russian eye-surgeon guy to jail, suggesting that he will hurt John; only to have him successfully complete the operation, and take care of John afterwards?

Nick N.

Answer: Because subverting the expectations of the viewer makes it more interesting. The audience (and potentially John) are set-up to expect bad things, which don't happen. Once the "bad thing" happened, the suspense would be gone and everyone could relax. Expecting something bad but knowing when it might happen maintains the tension.

Chosen answer: It's what's known as a McGuffin; a plot element that seems to be important when introduced, but serves no purpose other than to intrigue/distract the audience. The term was popularised by Alfred Hitchcock.

J I Cohen

That's not *quite* what a MacGuffin is. A MacGuffin not only seems important, it *is* important; in fact, one of its two diagnostic characteristics is that a MacGuffin is something around which the entire plot revolves. The other property fundamental to what makes something a MacGuffin is the fact that the origin, purpose, function, and, in some cases, even identity of the object is left either vague or completely undefined. The briefcase in Pulp Fiction is a classic example (although there *is* a compelling argument that the object in the briefcase is in fact a specific artifact).

Well, according to the doctor when the operation is beginning, the doctor reveals that in prison, he spent all of his time in the library, including books on medicine and technology. As a result, he found his "true calling", and is thankful to John for helping him see that.

More questions & answers from Minority Report

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