Erik Reuter wrote spoilers for the movie:
In addition to the glaring errors Marvin pointed out, I thought the whole justice system for prevented murders was ridiculously unlikely. The wooden painted balls were just silly. And it seemed the potential murderers were tried and sentenced for murder before they were even caught. I would have expected something like an arrest warrant to be issued by the judge/witness, then the potential murderer is apprehended, then there is a trial. Probably, things would work out that the cops, when feasible, would wait until the last minute for the murderer to make an attempt, then they would stop the murderer just in time, which would make the evidence more likely to hold up in court. Since the murder was not committed, the crime should be attempted murder, not murder. If convicted, the attempted murderer should be treated accordingly, but it seems unlikely it would be necessary to put them in some mental-vegetable prison. Perhaps some prison time ould be necessary for some, but more likely would be house arrest, therapy, maybe community service (perhaps combined with police surveillance, since they might commit other crimes than murder during their rehabilitation/parole).
That would have made a lot more sense. I would imagine that Dick just liked the shock value of sending someone to prison for a crime that hasn't been committed yet. Since he was just writing a short story, he didn't really have to work through all of the real-world implications. The movie, on the other hand, was long enough for the audience to start wondering about that stuff.
Also, I can understand the necessity not to go into too much detail about how the oracle children are able to predict the future, but the movie could have told us more about their lives. Maybe I missed an explanation (my concentration was a bit off when I saw the movie), but I wanted to know how the children were chosen,
Years before the start of the movie, that old lady with the animated plants developed some sort of cure for fetal alcohol syndrome (or something like it), which killed most of the subjects. The survivors ended up with precognitive abilities as a side effect. I got the impression that there weren't a whole lot of those survivors, so I don't know where they would have gotten enough Pre-Cogs to fill the demand if the PreCrime program had actually been adopted nationally.
Did anyone read the book on which the movie was based? I wonder if it was any better thought out.
It wasn't a book. Like most Dick works that get adapted into movies, it was a fairly short story. It's been a few years since I read it, but IIRC, it included the three idiot-savant pre-cogs, the same main character, and the false murder accusation. After the main character got chased around for a while, he used the minority report to clear himself, then pushed to reform the system to always take the minority report into account. ______________________________________________________________________ Steve Sloan ......... Huntsville, Alabama =========> [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brin-L list pages .............................. http://www.brin-l.org Chmeee's 3D Objects .................... http://www.sloan3d.com/chmeee 3D and Drawing Galleries .................. http://www.sloansteady.com Software ................ Science Fiction, Science, and Computer Links Science fiction scans ......................... http://www.sloan3d.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
