Daniel Ngo

Mr. Brown J

Minority Report Review

May 23, 2017

Minority Report

Minority Report is a movie about a society that has successfully reduced crime rate significantly.

They are able to do this through a company that uses three people called "precogs". These people are

able to see into the future, but these visions are limited to crimes. These visions are used to successfully

stop the crime before it even happens. The people who are stopped from crime are convicted of

precrime and then are taken into custody and put into a deep sleep. This tells the viewers that the

society is supposed to be an utopian place since there is no crime. Another aspect of this society is that

the government controls everything and sees everything. As for the movie itself, it incorporated many

filmmaking techniques in the creation of this movie. The camera views shown in the movie has many

breaks where the camera would switch to a different angle throughout the scene. This allows the

audience to see the whole set design and all of the details of it. The lighting of the movie is overall dark

and opaque. The screen would occasionally get dimmer when scenes depicts a problem or something

that reveals a dark secret. Accompanying the diming of the lighting during these scenes, the music

would become dark by using low tones. The music, however, fluctuates throughout the whole movie

since the music sets the tones for different types of scenes. During chase scenes where the protagonist

is running for his life, the music would become upbeat and fast to imitate the protagonist running in a

rhythmic way. The movie also integrated suspenseful moments during the movie by having no sound

during the scenes where the audience becomes fearful for the protagonist. Then all of a sudden, a burst

of sound would commence to scare the viewers. As for the costumes for the actors, there was no real

significance behind them that I could think of. The actor choices of the movie, in my opinion, were very

good since Tom Cruise played excellently as his role. Next, the names of the actors in the movie had
some kind of symbolism. Agatha's last name was lively, but that last name contradicts her actions

because throughout the movie she is shown to be emotionless and not able to move from her spot in

the pool where she receives the visions. The director of the pre-crime organization also had a symbolic

last name. His last name was Burgess which means a person with authority and or privileges which was

shown in the movie since the director had many privileges and had authority over the whole company.

Overall the whole move was very well made and incorporated several movie techniques that makes the

movie more interesting and thrilling to watch.

The message the movie is trying to convey to the viewers about our society is about how are

justice system works. In the movie the system of pre-crime was said to be perfect and was never wrong,

but the system was not 100% correct because the protagonist did not kill the person he was supposed to

kill. This applies to our court system today since people are still being falsely accused and are punished

for not committing the crime. The Huffington Post stated that 149 people were exempt from their

punishment since they were found not guilty for the crime. The number of people that had a wrongful

conviction has been on the rise. In 2005, the Huffington Post said that 61 people were found not guilty

and it has been increasing ever since. The punishments for these people were estimated to be about

14.5 years in prison and many have been on death row too. The Washington Post said about 4.1% or 1

out 25 people said to be sentenced to death were innocent. The sad part of these cases is that some of

the defendants who are found guilty, even though they were innocent, are people with intellectual

disabilities and can be under 18 too. All of these false accusations can be credited to flawed forensic

evidence, faulty eyewitness identification, and more. The Huffington Post said that the Innocence

Project found that over 70% of the false convictions are related to the eyewitness misidentification.

Many studies have proven that human memory is not reliable enough for the identification process. In
the end, our society's justice system is flawed and should be fixed. We should do more careful

inspections, conduct more trials and make sure these trials are done well.

Bibliography

Ferner, Matt. "A Record Number Of People Were Exonerated In 2015 For Crimes They Didn't Commit." The
Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 03 Feb. 2016. Web. 25 May 2017.

Gross, Samuel R. "The Staggering Number of Wrongful Convictions in America." The Washington Post. WP
Company, 24 July 2015. Web. 25 May 2017.