Minority Report (2002)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/

Quote

Minority Report is a 2002 science fiction film directed by Steven Spielberg, loosely based on the Philip K. Dick short story of the same name. It is set primarily in the Washington, D.C. area in the year 2054, where a special police department called "Precrime" apprehends criminals based on foreknowledge, provided by three psychics termed "precogs". The film stars Tom Cruise as John Anderton, a Precrime officer, who heads the Precrime police force. Colin Farrell plays Danny Witwer, an agent from the Department of Justice who is sent to observe the process, Samantha Morton portrays the senior precog Agatha, and Max von Sydow plays Lamar Burgess, Anderton's superior. It is one of several films based on stories by Philip K. Dick. The film cost over $100 million, though it made more than three times that in worldwide box office, and sold at least four million DVDs in its first few months of release.[1][2] Minority Report was one of the best reviewed films of 2002,[3] and was nominated for and won several awards.[4] These included four Saturn Awards, including Best Science Fiction Film and Best Direction. Minority Report also earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Sound Editing. The film has a distinctive look, featuring desaturated colors which make it almost resemble a black-and-white film, yet the blacks and shadows have a high contrast, resembling film noir.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_Report_(film)
As is rather characteristic of a dystopian Sci-Fi movie, Minority Report too is laced with predictive programming elements. I will present them by showing one or more screenshots illustrating each, followed by an elaboration.

1. 
   
   
   
   Government enforced control is imposed, among other means, by mandatory identification in which eyes or irises are scanned on various occasions and through various means. For instance, the eyes of potential customers are scanned on entering a store. People entering their workplace must have their eyes scanned also. And there's a scene in which law enforcement officers initiate and direct an eye-scanning procedure to an entire city-block in order to attempt to apprehend the bad-guy (in this case it is the hero of the movie though). In order to safeguard their safety the identification procedure is implemented by the use of spider-like robots.This PP theme is to make the viewer aware of a future in which mandatory identification, through eye-scanning for instance, possibly imposed several times a day, will be as ordinary as having cereals for breakfast.


2. 
   
   
   
   "Look mom! no hands!" (j/k)
   
   These pictures paint a reality in which passenger traffic in the city obviously has been totally revamped. Quite unlike another scene in which Anderton (Tom Cruise) is happily steering across the country side, there is no such thing as having control over your own vehicle while in the city. That is, automated piloting has become the norm while you transport from point A to point B in the city.
   
   The viewer is made aware that in the future you won't have control over your own vehicle except when you are in the rural area where traffic densities are low enough to permit a passenger to play their own driver. This means more government imposed control. Although in terms of preventing accidents and increasing transport efficiency, automated piloting does not seem an entirely unreasonable resolution.


3. 
   
   Virtual reality in galore. The viewer sees images of virtual sex and virtual praise in an attempt to make the concept of 'virtuality' appealing (if not bizarre LOL).


4. 
   
   
   
   Law enforcement is equipped with all kinds of gadgets that are still quite exotic for the present time. You see agents with jet-packs strapped on while carrying non-lethal weapons such as 'sick-sticks', which induce sickness on contact with would-be arrestees. Guns that emit airborne shock-waves to knock out assailants or other 'trouble-makes'. And then you have the next generation of cuffs that go not to the hands but to the head and upon activation instantly renders incapacitated the recipient.
   
   The viewer is let in on what type of novel gadgetry they may expect from the police-force in the future.


5. 
   
   On entering a store and after identification through eye-scanning, a prospecting customer is welcomed by a constant barrage of customer-specific advertisements, call it spam on steroids if you will (as I do). This implies that there is no such thing as privacy in the future and that all kinds of commercial agencies, such as advertisement agencies have access to your personal data so as to be able to tweak advertisement to suit your customer habits. The idea that there will be no privacy in the not too distant future is thus once more reinforced on the viewer.


6. 
   Of course, the idea of the Hived Mind gets peddled to the viewer once more.


7. 
   Here you see the main character buying illegal streetdrugs from a dealer who seems to have no eyes in his sockets. As an aside, while peddling his gear the dealer utters the interesting phrase: "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."
   
   http://www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com/
   I came across this slogan for the first time on Alan Watt's site, the researcher who implicitly introduced me too the concept of predictive programming. The meaning of the slogan is that if all people are prevented from seeing (like most dumbed-down, complacent, lethargic or otherwise handicapped sheeple are prevented from seeing what's really happening in and to the world), the person who has but the slightest quality of vision automatically has the possibility to dominate and exploit everyone else. Anyway, I am drifting.
   
   So, in addition to the no doubt overwhelming availability of whole galaxies of prescription drugs there are also still the good-old street-drugs just in case meds from the former category cannot give you the kind of satisfaction you were looking for.


8. 
   
   Perpetrators of thought-crime are not relocated to traditional prisons but rather are more like stored in specially arranged facilities in which the inmates are brought into some sort of state of suspended animation and kept in cylindrically shaped confined spaces. Could this be a future echo of the type of prison-system we might one day get to see installed?

Although the thematic centerpiece of the movie, pre-crime, features a fatal weakness (that being the presence of echos generated by the precogs), the viewer is not dissuaded to think that one day in the future law-enforcement based on the premonition of crime may be implemented without any flaws (especially if enough tax-dollars are thrown at it).

After all, in the movie it is being advertised and bragged about that, through pre-crime, murder-rates have plummeted to negligible levels. Therefore, of and by itself, the notion of pre-crime is presented to the viewer as being not something that is altogether disadvantageous to society. What the viewer is not made aware of however, is the type of intrusion and indeed the violation of privacy associated with the imposition of a pre-crime system onto the public. The realization of a pre-crime system therefore ultimately boils down to increases in control for the government and less freedom for its citizens. The mantra never changes, sadly.