P.K. Dick’s The Minority Report and Steven Spielberg’s The Minority Report

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P.K. Dick’s The Minority Report and Steven Spielberg’s The Minority Report

Death can occur in four ways. A person can die from a physical illness, viruses and infections. A person can die from an accident. A person can commit suicide. Finally a person can be murdered by another person. What if murders could be prevented? In P.K. Dick’s story The Minority Report, and in Spielberg’s film The Minority Report, the future can be altered by using incredible technology. The success of Spielberg’s adaptation of Dick’s short story to film can be determined by the way each was presented.

While giving a tour or precrime to Edward Witwer, the main character John Anderton finds the he is supposed to kill a person he never met Leopold Kaplan. When he tries to run and hide from precrime, Anderton is kidnapped by Kaplan. Kaplan is about to turn Anderton in to the police when Anderton is rescued by Fleming. Fleming gives Anderton money and a clue, which leads Anderton to conclude that he has an alternate future that will clear his name. He then goes to precrime to find his minority report and prove to the police that he will not commit murder. He is discovered by his wife, who he suspects is working against him, and they both leave precrime in a helicopter. On the helicopter, Anderton, his wife Lisa, and Fleming get into a fight and Anderton kills Fleming after discovering that Fleming is working for Kaplan in order to take precrime down and establish a military police state. Lisa and Anderton return to precrime where Witwer and they come up with a plan to save precrime by proving the predictions of the precogs correct where Anderton will kill Kaplan. At a press conference, Kaplan is about the revel the failure of precrime t...

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...ck only had helicopters and regular fossil fuel buses in his story, while Spielberg went farther and made vehicles which are futuristic and practical. He modernized precrime by giving them a hover jet ship which has its roots in technology which is being developed by the US Air Force today. The idea of having cars that use magnetism to travel as super speed and still be environmentally safe, is an idea which is more practically sound to exist in the future. Spielberg also took the story a dove deeper into the characters and into precrime’s history. He took a great story which was written in the mid twentieth century and really modernized it to become believable and extraordinary.

Bibliography

Dick, Philip K. The Minority Report and other classic stories. New York. 1987

Spielberg, Steven. The Minority Report. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp, USA

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