After I watched it, later on I thought about it and many question came into my head, about paradoxes and such. It can be explained, and yet maybe it can’t, basically one must watch it with the same attitude I have when I watch Star Trek or similar stuff. Trying to make sense of it but from time to time just accepting what they say.
The details:
Captain John Anderton (Tom Cruise) works for the department of Pre-crime in Washington. There are three people called Pre-cogs that have special powers and can see future murders. There’s a machine attached to their heads and when they see something, the machine writes on a ball the names of the victims and on another ball the name of the perpetrator. At this point John and his squad look at the images available of the premonition, and try to find the right person and the right place. We see a case at the beginning of the movie, a red ball meaning a crime of passion, so it comes out only a few hours before it’ll happen. Agent Witwer (Colin Farrell) is there to control and find out if there’s a flaw in the system, a human error that is, and is after John because he makes use of drugs.
They explain to him that there are no more premeditated murders anymore because anyone knows the pre-cogs will see it days before it happens, now there are only crimes of passion, like the one we follow, where a man comes home to find his wife with another man and kills them both... but he’s about to do it when John bursts in and stops him and arrests him.
Since they found the pre-cognitives and started the Pre-crime, murder stopped within a year. Now six years have passed.
“We call the female Agatha (Samantha Morton), the twins are Arthur and Dashiell (Michael and Matthew Dickman)”. John strongly believes in the pre-crime system, thinks it's flawless and important. He tells Witwer during his inspection: “it’s better if you don’t think of them as humans” and “pre-cogs are pattern-recognition filters, that’s all”. He stays behind, maybe curiosity, he stands close to the pool where the three precogs are detained, kept drugged, and Agatha suddenly grabs him and shows him images of an old premonition. He starts investigating, sees the perpetrator well in custody (they are confined in a sort of cubicles, they stand with a thing around their head that makes them dream, or hallucinate, or anyway not be present to themselves, so they never more or speak or do anything. The almost-victim though appears to be missing. He talks about this to Lamar (Max Von Sydow), one of the people who created the Pre-crime.
The next premonition is not a red ball but a premeditated crime, and John starts watching the images of a victim he’s never seen before, until he sees himself as the killer. Of course he runs away, he must escape quickly but it’s not easy because there is eye-recognition everywhere, so they soon find him. John now has to fight his old squad in a weird-futuristic chase. Witwer is also after him, and by chance John manages to escape when they fight inside a factory and a car is built all around John.
Instead of crashing him, he finds himself on the front seat !
Before he was in a car in the city traffic, and the car tried to take him back when they found him, but this car seems to be out of the system, maybe a luxury car. John goes to talk to Dr Hinneman, an eccentric woman who found the pre-cogs and founded pre-crime. I’m not really sure here, did she say that she experimented on the children of junkies who couldn’t take care of them? I think so, I’m sure she said that many of them died. She tells him that the pre-cogs are never wrong, but sometimes they don’t agree. When two of them show the same images, and the third something different, although slightly, this one is called Minority Report. The minority reports are erased, but there’s always a copy inside the most gifted pre-cog, Agatha of course. She tells him that there is no escape, the pre-cogs are never wrong, and yet it depends on what the minority report says... so he must go back inside but he knows that before reaching the station there will be lots of eye-recognition scans along the way, he’d never make it with his own eyes, so he goes to a ‘doctor’ performing illegal operations, and he has a change of eyes, keeping his own in a bag.. it’s an ex surgeon he once arrested (not sure for what, did he set people on fire?). The operation goes well, though, it’s not too angry about the arrest apparently, still he leaves rotten food for him in the fridge. He must rest for twelve hours without taking the bandages off or he’ll go blind, and leaves him some drugs as a gift (...) and he dreams of the day his son was taken away...
The agents arrive in that building and set free some kind of robotic spiders (much like the ones we’ll see in the doctor who episode of the end of the world). He tries go into a bathtub full of ice so they can’t see him, but the little things are quite smart and sneaky and find him anyway, and pull up the bandage on one eye to scan him, and then it’s ok, they all go away. It’s been only six hours, but he’s lucky like all movie heroes and his new eyes are ok.
He goes back, uses some kind of drugs the doc gave him that deforms his face, and reaches Agatha. He tries to get the info he wants there, but there’s no time because he’s found out, so he takes her out with him. Witwer had seen Agatha’s face in the premonition video, so knew he would come for her.
John takes her out, 51 minutes away from the ‘murder’. He goes to Rufus, a hacker who provides any kind of virtual entertainment, and asks him to download and record her data so he connects her to a machine and they see it all again, but there’s nothing more on his own case. She tells him that there is no minority report this time. They run again, he buys her new clothes and with her help he can elude the squad. He wears a Bulgari watch, by the way, so I’d say his job pays rather well...
They enter this Leo Crow’s apartment, and he finds that the bed is full of pictures of children, and there’s also his son Sean. The man admits he killed the boy, and now John really wants to kill him, but Agatha shouts that he has a choice, that now that he knows everything he can choose, and John chooses to arrest him. It’s very painful, but he arrests him. Now the surprise: the man is not happy about it, he wants to be killed or his family won’t get anything. He says a man planned it all and gave him the fake pictures and told him to pretend to be the boy’s killer. Now more than ever John does not want to kill him, but the man insists and there’s a battle in reverse, where the man tries to force him to shoot. The gun fires, we see a hole in the window which breaks and he falls down to his death. Indeed it all went as the pre-cogs had predicted, everything he saw in the premonition came true, the window broke and he died. Only, he didn’t kill him.
Witwer understands that the scene has been faked, that it’s not normal to find all those pictures like that, of cases at least six years old, like Sean’s. He starts thinking that John might have been set up, and starts investigating the same case John was reviewing. He finds something and goes to Lamar to tell him his theory, and Lamar kills him (as I knew he would, but what doesn’t make much sense is that Witwer would go to him with his findings. Witwer didn’t answer to him, on the contrary they were on different sides. Maybe he thought he’d listened to him because he was supposed to be John’s friend...)
Now John doesn’t know what to do but still has to run and hide, so he takes Agatha to his wife Lara’s place - they separated because of the pain, they loved each other but being together was too painful.
She tells Lamar that he’s there, thinking he’ll help her. They talk about what happened and suddenly he understands that he had been framed because he was looking into Anne’s case.
Agatha starts talking about Sean and how much love was in that house once, and also talks of a woman who only wanted her daughter back...
The squad arrives, and even if Agatha shouts for him to run he’s too late and they surround him and arrest him, and put him in their “containment field”. Agatha is taken back to her ‘pool’.
Lara is sad about what happened, she’s sure that he didn’t kill anybody. She talks to Lamar and asks him about Anne’s case, and talks about Crow being a fake, and he makes a mistake. Lara: “I never said she drowned”. They’re in his office so he can’t do anything right away, and also there is a conference waiting for him, to give him some prize and honor him...
She goes to their prison, gaining access thanks to John’s eyes that she retrieved among all his things. “I’d like a word with my husband”, she says.
We see Lamar at the celebration, he receives a call and it’s John: “you created a world without murder; all you had to do was kill someone to do it” and “Agatha’s mother, Anne Lively, just a junkie who had a kid once and had to give her up, but surprise! She cleaned herself up and she wanted her daughter back, she wanted Agatha” and of course without Agatha there would have been no pre-crime, he had nothing. He couldn’t simply get rid of her because the pre-cogs would have seen it, so what he did was paying a man to kill her. The man would have killed her but the precogs saw it and the squad stopped him, and they thought that was it, but no. After they took away the ‘hitman’, Lamar came to her, dressed up as him and killed her the same way the pre-cogs had predicted it would go.
Agatha had a vision, but it was so similar to the other one that they discarded it as an echo. He was able to manage it because working there he had seen the images of the first premonition, so he re-enacted it exactly like he had seen it. Nobody ever suspected a thing, only Agatha knew.
A colleague of John makes everybody see the footage of his murder, the whole thing complete, where they can see clearly his face before he puts on the ‘mask’.
Now the pre-cogs see another murder, a red ball saying that Lamar will kill John. Like before, now John tells him that of course they will have predicted it, and that he can think about it and choose what he wants to do (kill John, prove the precogs are never wrong but end up in the field, or not kill him thus proving that the precogs can be wrong and the system he created doesn’t work) and he chooses to shoot himself. This is the end. We’re told that the pre-crime experiment was abandoned and all the prisoners released, we see that John and Lara are together again and she’s now pregnant, and then the loveliest scene for me, they tell us that Agatha and the twins have been relocated in a place where they can finally live in peace like normal people, and we see the boys playing a board game together and Agatha on a couch reading a book, they have hair again and they live in a sort of cottage in an isolated place, without other houses around, so they can’t sense anybody. Good, poor kids.
Or is it? Because how could it be premeditated? When he was outside his door he was still sure he didn’t know him and would never kill him, so how could they say it was premeditated? Because, you know, it was never premeditated. The idea was that he’d find him, learn that he was looking at the man who killed his son, and he’d kill him in a rage of vengeance. My idea is that Agatha always knew how things could be, my idea is that she wanted John to help her. She could summon any premonition she wanted at will, this is shown when she shows John Anne’s old case. She showed it to him because he was there and she touched him, maybe establishing some kind of link with him, who knows. The pre-crime people told us that they can only see murders, but that means that they can produce images only for murder cases, it doesn’t mean that Agatha can’t see other things. She can sense a lot more, as it is shown when she helps John escape - she knows it’ll start raining and they’ll need an umbrella, that the balloons and the umbrella will keep them covered from the squad looking for them. I think that she had a big part in it. She’s the most gifted, and the one directly involved. John lost a son, she lost a mother.
p.s. it took me quite a research to find the quote I was looking for, the only thing I remembered of the episode was Paris saying something about hearing their message before they sent it, and wondering if his question made any sense and Janeway saying no.. and that’s it, but after a few google searches I found it: parallax :-D
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