A future in crime?
Despite its state-of-the-art computer graphics and eye-catching special effects, Minority Report is basically a chase movie built on a question—one that Charles Dickens explored in A Christmas Carol. Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge asks the visiting spirits if his foretold future of loneliness and gloom is how things "will" be, or how they "might" be. In Dickens, the answer is that Scrooge can change the late-night prophecy. (Why else would the spirits be visiting him, he correctly surmises.) In Minority Report, the answer is a bit cloudier, which makes the tale a lot more frightening.
The story plays out in Washington, D.C., in the year 2054, where murder has become obsolete thanks to a new crime-fighting method labeled "Pre-Crime." With the help of three "Pre-Cogs," who are able to foresee murders before they happen and make their terrifying visions available to the police, it is possible for investigators to grab the killers-to-be before the fateful blow is struck.
The Pre-Cogs, we discover, are the children of drug-addicted mothers, born with a peculiar brain damage that turns them into soothsayers.
