Critics

The Philip K Dick’s story vs the film

The major additions to the Dick’s story consist of a wide range of digital and military productions as the consequence of imaginary technology being promoted, new and developed ‘hide and seek’ drama, characters and events. There is a long list of changes in the screenplay compared to the Philip K Dick’s short story, including:

• The way Anderton gets his new identification in the story, starting with a fake accident and finding himself as “Ernest Temple, an unemployed electrician, drawing a weekly subsistence from the State of New York, with a wife and four children in Buffalo”[2] is totally modified in the film with replacing new eyes. Staying in a hotel with a poor condition in a slum area, listening to the news, getting into a bath bowl are adopted from the Dick’s story, but in the film, the building is not a hotel, there is TV news instead of radio, and the three-leg robot-spider explores in the bath to scan his eyes. There is no ‘eye scan’ in the story.

• In Minority Report (2002), we learn about the mission of Precrime by an advertising video including the interview with the director of Precrime Lamar Burgess, but the Dick’s story begins with Anderton visiting Witwer reluctantly and they clarify their position in the organization. Then we learn about the precrime organisation through their conversation while they walk to the office and examine each part they see.[3]

• There is a drug dealer in Spielberg’s film as a homeless guy with no eyes, saying ‘in the land of the blinds, one eye man is king’, but he doesn’t exist in the Dick’s story. 

• Pursuit and escape by individual flying instruments, the comic accidents in people’s house and the advertising scene of fight in the car factory are significantly additional dramas to the Dick’s story.

Some changes in details such as the age and name of the characters, the physical appearance of precogs, the place Anderton hides himself and he doesn’t pretend that he is an electrician may not functionally take the screenplay apart from the Dick’s version, but they enhance the imagery and the action drama style of the story in the film. For example, regarding the precogs, Spielberg adopts the systematic function of the idea, but he updates the physical shape of the precogs and their condition and place, including additional relationships and actions that signifies the precog’s role in the story. Here Agatha talks and asks an intensively metaphoric question ‘Can you see it?’, in contrast to Anderton who is blinded with his honesty and faith to Precrime until he exchanges his own eyes in the black market enabling himself to see.[4] The significant metaphor of exchanging the eyes stands out among the many successful additional elements in the film. Furthermore, precogs are modified human, but not just robots. For instance, Agatha is able to understand that Laura’s house is full of love, when she reveals the story of Anderton’s son to him and his wife and moreover her effort is to disclose her mother being murdered earlier by Lamar, the director of Precrime. 

Anderton’s programmatic interest to Precrime in the Philip k Dick’s story is converted to a personal dedication which is derived from his loss of son.[5]

In the Dick’s story, Lisa has an active appearance from the beginning to the end, but in the Spielberg’s film, she, with her updated name Lara, comes to the screen in the second half of the film and plays her very key role at the end to uncover the mystery of what Agatha was frequently asking ‘can you see it?’. She helps Anderton to display Lamar killing Agatha’s mother on the public screen at his promotion ceremony and press conference. 

 

Spielbergian look 

Looking back at the history of Spielberg’s filmmaking, his intellectual consideration about Hollywood’s continuously need for ‘heroism’ is proved again with the identification of Anderton in Minority Report.[6]However, regardless of the commercial considerations there are thematic motivations in the Spielberg’s works that the character of the Lost Boy stands more memorable for the audience among the others. The Lost Boy used to be an essential character in Spielberg films such as:  E.T.: The Extra-Terrestial, Empire of the Sun, Hook, Always, the above-mentioned A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, etc. [7]

Garry Goldman suggests that pointing to the system of governing in U.S and war in Spielberg’s previous films like Saving Private Ryan and Lincoln is reflected in Minority Report with purposing that the system violates the constitution according to[8].  On the other hand, according to Robert Batey in spite the Philip K Dick’s story in which the precogs’ predictions were not false, in the Spielberg’s narration the predictions could be a false. “We in the audience realize that Anderton will not be committing murder, that the precogs’ prediction was a false positive, and that free will does play a role in human affairs”.[9] However Minority Report (2002) remains faith full to the smart focusing on perception of uncovering crime before it happens based on Philip K Dick’s idea in his short story which Pat Brereton claims that it “has been read as an allegorical comment on the flawed rationale for the current War on Terror and of taking out an enemy before concrete evidence is available or due process is considered or even enabled (see e.g. Grusin, 2004; Shapiro, 2005; or Packer, 2006)”.[10]

 

Philip K Dick’s Reflection in Minority Report

Philip K Dick is known for his fundamental questions and philosophic self-care and his own words uncovers him more to us: “What is reality? And what constitutes the authentic human being? Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?”.[11]

The philosophy and the morality of Philip K Dick is shadowing on entire the film. Spielberg does not show a safe world for joy and romance, but he resembles the Philips private sphere with concentrating on the ‘isolation zone’ of the characters.[12] Perhaps this is the way the Minority Report can mirror Philip’s introduction of himself: I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist… Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak.[13]

Although, there are many thematic ideas added and even alternatives suggested in Minority Report (2002) instead of Philip’s ideas, but still the film represents his character with setting fundamental questions about law, right and the authority of surveillance. Mark G Cooper particularly refers to the Bentham’s imaginary and metaphoric circular building of Panopticon to explain the presence of Dick’s sceptic and critic mind. “At the heart of Minority Reports futuristic penal system lies a Panopticon. As in Jeremy Bentham's eighteenth-century model, transparent cells rim a central observation tower.”[14]

In some characteristic dimensions, Anderton represents the Minority Report’s writer, as Philip K Dick was involved with some drug addiction in his personal life and Anderton is so. Also, Anderton suffers from his deep grief of loss in his family, the loss of his (almost baby) son and his wife in some extent resembles Philip’s personal grief and loss of his baby twin sister and parent. Anderton’s loneliness looks quite same to the Philip’s isolation. 

Briefly, Minority Report (2002) is a successful thriller/noire sci fi film in which a combination of Philip K Dick’s philosophic and troubled personality and Spielbergian vision is spectacularly screened. 

 

 References

 

[1] Minority Report - movie: watch stream online. (n.d.). Www.justwatch.com. Retrieved May 17, 2024, from https://www.justwatch.com/au/movie/minority-report

[2] K Dick, Ph 1956, The Minority Report, Ch V, p 115.

[3] K Dick, Ph 1956, The Minority Report, Ch I, p 100.

[4] Rountree, C 2004, The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, vol. 23, p 78.

[5] Batey R 2003, Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Minority Report and the Law of Attempt, P 690.  

4 Brereton, P 2012, Smart Cinema, DVD Add-Ons and New Audience Pleasures, Ch 9, p 164.  

[7] Rountree, C 2004, The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, vol. 23, p 85.

[8] Batey R 2003, Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Minority Report and the Law of Attempt, P 691. [Jason Koornick, The Minority Report on ‘Minority Report’: A Conversation with Gary Goldman, at http://www.philipkdick.com/interviews/goldman.htm (last visited Feb. 8, 2004)]  

[9] Batey R 2003, Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Minority Report and the Law of Attempt, p 693.

[10] Brereton, P 2012, Smart Cinema, DVD Add-Ons and New Audience Pleasures, Ch 9, p 160.  

[11] K Dick, P 1985, How to Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, p 8.

[12] G Cooper M, The Contradictions of Minority Report, p 24.

[13] K Dick, Ph, Lawrence Sutin, 1995, The Shifting Realities of Philip k Dick, p 9.

[14] G Cooper M, The Contradictions of Minority Report, p 27.