Minority Report/Wall Banger

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Wall Bangers from Minority Report include:

  • In a World where everything from subway trains to billboards routinely scans the eyes of passersby and automatically reports wanted criminals to proper authorities, one would assume that security in the police headquarters would be up to par. But after the Pre-Crime cop John Anderton has been declared a wanted criminal, nobody reprograms the retinal scanners in police headquarters to revoke his access credentials. This allows him to use his removed eyes (that he kept in a bag) to steal the titular MacGuffin, which puts the entire Pre-Crime program into jeopardy. Granted, that glaring lapse in security may have been a Evil Plan by the Big Bad to murder a nosy inspector without Pre-Crime detecting it. But after Anderton has been captured and incarcerated, his wife uses the same security hole again to bust her husband out of jail.
    • This assumes that Anderton did break out. Remember that the jailer told him as he was going under, "It's actually kind of a rush. They say you get visions; that your life flashes before your eyes. That all your dreams come true." Considering it's based on a story by Philip K. Dick, it's amazing more people don't think it's All Just a Dream.
    • It's unlikely to have been a dream. Before he ever goes to prison, Anderton's mentor is revealed to be the mastermind behind everything without his knowledge. This subplot is resolved at the end of the film, meaning that Anderton would be dreaming of a conflict he did not know about. Aside from that, why would he make a "perfect dream" in which a close friend becomes his enemy and dies?
  • Dream or not, why didn't the security system require the eye-scanner to check for pupillary response to light? Presumably Anderton wasn't the first guy in history to use a dead eye to try and fool a scan.
  • Cracked pointed out a massive plot hole. A crime goes unknown because the killer murders someone that was already going to be killed. Since it happened in the same way near the same time, the Cops past it off as an "afterthought." The problem here is that whenever a pre-crime happens a ball with the killer's name on it pops up...
    • It is stated by one character that these "minority reports" are normally disregarded and destroyed. So it is not inconceivable that the balls appearing along with these visions are treated as part of the flaw and similarly discarded.
    • Except nowhere in the movie do the echoes or visions of previous murders produce balls with the victim's and killer's name on it. This "echo" should have produced balls that the real echoes did not. Even if all echoes did produce balls, the ball for the killer would have a different name. How exactly could the techs disregard that?
    • Perhaps the names only appear when the precogs' vision shows faces. Recordings of visions could be subjected to the same identity-scans as are used throughout the film, but both the attackers in the crucial vision wore masks, meaning only the victim's identity could pop up on a ball.
    • Besides, seems like that to trigger the alarm and activate the system, the Hive Mind of the precogs must be working - Agatha's afterthought which moves the plot had no impact, but the murders which end up being "broadcast" by all three precogs do.
  • There's the possibility that they just were too lazy to reprogram their system to no longer accept Anderson's eyes for access. It seemed to have been the first time someone with access like that had been arrested, he was locked up and in some sort of an induced sleep-like state, and no one probably suspected that his wife thought to hold on to one of his bloody eyeballs. Without any sort of precedent like that, it's not impossible that it slipped their minds.
  • There's also the very premise that, apparently you can be arrested and imprisoned for life, without trial, because a machine says you were going to kill somebody. In Real Life, even attempted murder doesn't warrant a life sentence. Wouldn't something like that warrant more, rather than fewer, safeguards to prevent abuse?
    • Isn't that kind of the entire point of the story..?
  • The threat of Precrime "going national". In the film, there are exactly three precogs who were created by accident, and whose range appears to be limited to a few miles radius. There's absolutely no way conceivable that Precrime could "go national" with the facts presented in the film.
    • Unless there was some sort of secret plan to create more precogs. Considering how the original three got their powers, that would be quite nasty.
      • Maybe there are a bunch more precogs anyway, but they are all haloed, or possibly in lunatic asylums doped to the eyeballs on ephemerol "liquid cosh?"

Back to Minority Report