Preview

Ethical Issues in the 2002 Steven Spielberg Movie Minority Report

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1228 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Ethical Issues in the 2002 Steven Spielberg Movie Minority Report
Ethical Issues in The 2002 Steven Spielberg Movie
Minority Report Technology is progressing every day. We have come so far in the past ten years. Imagine life in 2054, and what life will be like. That is what Philip K. Dick did in 1956 when he wrote the short story Minority Report, which was later produced as a movie. In the movie Minority Report, a team of officers led by John Anderson (Tom Cruise), work together in the precime division. They collect information given by precogs to find murder suspects and victims before the crime actually happens. Precogs are three humans that were born with a brain disease. This brain disease affected others but these three are the only ones who survived. The disease caused some mutation and that mutation allowed them to see into the future by dreaming. The information they get from the precogs is gone through by Anderson, looking for clues that will tell them where the crime is going to take place. The location of the crime is the only element not given by the precogs. When the location is determined, Anderson and the precrime team rush to the location to stop the crime from happening and arrest the criminal for the “future crime”. The movie opens with a victim and suspect name, and the date and time of the crime. The first suspect is Howard, and the victim is his wife Sarah. Apparently Sarah has been having an affair and Howard finds out. Anderson goes through all of the images of the crime and decides that he knows where the crime is going to take place. The team rushes there and stops the crime seconds before the scheduled time of the murder. They stop the crime and arrest the suspect. This act of arresting people before the crime is committed seems to be a serious ethical issue. Yes the crime is seen through the images of the precogs, but the title of the movie is Minority Report. A minority report is when one of the precogs’ visions is different from the other two. Usually the one produced by

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    A History of Violence

    • 646 Words
    • 3 Pages

    A seemingly quaint story about a small business owner from Indiana turns into a blood curdling expose about violence and spiritual rebirth. Ignoring the opening seen the movie begins with Tom Stall, his wife Sarah and son Jack comforting Tom's daughter who can't sleep without a nightlight. The movie maintains this pace until two criminals try to rob Tom's small-town café. At gunpoint Tom disarms and kills the two robbers and is crowned the town's hero. However Tom's publicity brings some shady strangers to town that seems to think Tom from Indiana is actually Joey from Philadelphia. The rest of the film tells a story of a man fighting to protect his family from his past and protect himself from a seemingly imminent death.…

    • 646 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In the movie The Proposal, Margaret, an editor at a New York Publisher’s office, comes up with a plan to marry one of her employees, in order to escape being deported to Canada because of an expired visa. Putting Andrew’s career and future on the line, she promised him a promotion if he agreed. Since a skeptical INS agent was following Margaret, she and Andrew had to appear like a normal couple. They both flew to Andrew’s family home in Sitka, Alaska to celebrate his grandmothers 90th birthday and announce their engagement. Margaret’s selfishness and main goal of not being deported and losing her elite job soon change after she realizes she had fallen for Andrew. She had to do some soul searching about the way she communicates with her employees,…

    • 208 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    How we define human, subhuman and superhuman is complex, with many intricacies and unknowns. The relationship between them, regarding the Precogs in The Minority Report short story as well as the film, is complex between these two forms of dehumanization and humanization. For those unfamiliar with the works, the three Precogs are collectively, literally, the human engine which enables Precrime to exist. In both works, their superhuman ability to see the future has been harnessed giving, those who have access to the technology in which they are embedded, knowledge of future crimes. In this, their predominant overall treatment is as subhuman, and they are disconnected from normal human life. Though they are momentarily re-framed to the audience as superhuman (for this ability) in both works, they are predominantly dehumanized. The two stark differences in its film adaptation, which was created in 2002, are: The deification of the Precogs, stemming from this superhuman portrayal; wherein the movie offers a different perspective, whilst maintaining their subhuman status. And in the content of Precogs' life narrative. Though important axioms in their biographies are still similar to the story''s, this leads to the film's deviation in conclusion, as only in the final, epilogue scene, the precogs are released from the world of Precrime into a human life. Still, this ending's contrast sheds light on the subhuman state they existed in for the duration of the Precrime system's existence.…

    • 4508 Words
    • 19 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Halloween Movie Analysis

    • 1241 Words
    • 5 Pages

    The plot of the movie shows the story of the young psycho (Michael Myers), who escapes from the Smith’s Gove in order to kill people in Haddonfield. While being a six-year-old boy, Michael killed his older sister with a kitchen knife and…

    • 1241 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Steven Spielberg’s movie Minority Report portrays a world where murder never happens, our future society will not be as lucky. In the movie Minority Report police utilize a psychic technology to arrest and convict murderers before they commit their crime. This prevented almost all murders from happening which made the world a more peaceful place. In my vision of the future we are going to be solving crimes with floating cameras capturing everybody’s every move. In my vision pre-crime does not exist and murders still happen but the murderers are always caught.…

    • 495 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Ethics and truth are branches of philosophy evident in the film. In Minority Report, the pre-cogs are 3 children who live in half-awake conditions and have previsions of murder scenes simply for a utilitarian purpose, and also the personal gain of Burgess. It is not right to forego the freedom, innocence and happiness of 3 children just to prevent murders. Even though it is true that they are “suffering” for the greater good, however, they are still human beings and should have equal rights. It might be a “gift” to be able to predict murders and stop them from happening, and thus saving lives, and improving the security and safety of the people, however, if it is at an expense of the three pre-cog’s childhood and freedom, the ethical values of the government are definitely questioned. Truth is another branch of philosophy found in the film as the Pre-crime Department functions solely based on the previsions of the pre-cogs, which they deem to always be true. As said by Witwer, the Pre-crime Department is “arresting individuals who have broken no law”. It is impossible to prove that they were going to murder without physical evidence that it actually happened. Furthermore, the analogy brought up by Anderton to justify “the fact that you prevented it does not change the fact that it wasn’t going to happen” is simply a straw man fallacy. Due to the laws of physics, it is supposed to fall due to gravity. However, it is impossible to predict what a human being does since every individual is different. A vision is not sufficient to prove a crime as big as murder, and simply because there have been no…

    • 627 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Criminal Justice Trends

    • 1468 Words
    • 6 Pages

    In the past (early 2000) the criminal justice system found problems with a demanding change that was going nowhere fast, I’m refereeing to the fast pace world and the computer savvy criminals that were growing. The police and other law enforcement agencies tried to keep up and gain the upper hand. While they managed to do this, little did they know that in 2011 they would have to become more savvy with technology and learn how to stop credit card theft from using a gas station pump and getting gas, or from someone stealing your back information, just from walking by them or swiping your card at the bank. “Predictions and visions of the future are marked by challenges, expectations, advanced preparedness, and technological developments. During this the first decade of the twenty-first century, criminal justice professionals are encountering enormous challenges and organizational changes. Whether or not the technologically advanced changes in criminal justice investigations and crime control will continue to significantly reduce violent crime rates remains to be seen. Technological and social developments as well as policy changes offer much promise for the future. “Muraskin, R., and Roberts, A.K. (2005). Visions for Change: crime and Justice in the Twenty-First Century. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, N: Prentice Hall…

    • 1468 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Privacy, a dissipating concept as technology grows. People are constantly being watched whether or not they are aware of the occurrence. Through cell phones, student IDs, computers, public cameras and other electronic sources, people are monitored 24/7. In the movie, Minority Report directed by Steven Spielberg in the year 2002, the idea of vanishing privacy is addressed through the motif of eyes. Eyes, in the film, are known as the identifier and the tracker of a person and their life.…

    • 575 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Many famous individuals of color in our history have hoped to one day live in a nation without the feeling of a segregation between different ethnicities. Unfortunately, these hopes have still not come to fruition in our society today. The United States is still rocked by the idea that one pigment of color is superior to another. This discrimination is the cause of a lack in education in our generation and an aversion to difference that has been passed down from our ancestors. The movie Crash, accurately depicts these problems that we have seen with racism in our country for the past hundred years and more abundantly today. In this essay, I will be discussing how the movie crash shows how media hides the fact that racism is multicultural,…

    • 996 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    He always killed couples in their cars. He struck the man over the head and then shot him. And for the woman, he doesn’t like to shoot the women he prefers to stab them, the younger they are the more he stabs them. He stabbed her around 20 times. He took the women’s watch and he placed the 10th victims glasses on the guy. He kept the 10th victims glasses all this time because he is the only survivor. The team ended up tracking down the 10th survivor, his name was Foyet. They returned his glasses and got all of his addresses and different aliases, because he has been hiding from the killer.…

    • 733 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The movie starts off in a bedroom and a close up of a stack of literary books not commonly seen in a kids’ bedroom in the Bronx. That is where our young leading man Jamal is introduced. He wakes up in a hurry and goes out to meet with his friends at the neighborhood basketball court. They start talking about “the window” a man no one has seen but everyone has heard of. Speculations of who he is and what he has done are shared…

    • 1382 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dried Squid Analysis

    • 585 Words
    • 3 Pages

    This movie tells a prisoner who arrested on a charge of murders to his wife and her boyfriend. When he arrived at the house, he found their death body. They had already died before he arrived at the house. So, he insisted that he was innocent, but the court gave the guilty verdict. He had to serve a several decades sentence in prison.…

    • 585 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Gordon knows of Jigsaw because a few months prior to the scene in the bathroom, he was the prime suspect in a case. He was being busted by the detective Tapp and Sing. The detective viewed a video and shortly after they find out that Gordon has less than six hours to kill Adam or Jigsaw will murder his wife and daughter. Then men struggle to find a way out, however they find new clues and puzzles come up as well as facts that help them reveal that they aren’t as unconnected as they thought. There is no intro to this film, it starts and it’s already half way through the story line. The only insight we have is the flashbacks and they focus on the detective search for the killer as it goes terribly wrong. The scenes are all shot with damp, darkened…

    • 164 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The robbers where a couple of young brothers Alan Mender who was 17 and Joey Mender who was 14. Throughout the robbery Joey was super nervous and was somewhat aggressive to the hostages. But Alan on the other hand was calm and trying to keep Joey from doing anything more stupid then what they just did. Their plan was to be a quick in and out job. However when a lady driving by saw the two boy’s guns through the window she drove away and called the police. Now that Alan and Joey are stuck there they need to come up with a new plan, How to escape. During this process the robbers have to deal with Zach and his “big mouth” according to Joey. In my opinion Zach might have been the reason that no one got killed because without realizing it he was keeping the robbers attention on him. He was doing this by questioning everything they said, back talking, and reverse phycology. Alan didn’t mind it at all but Joey was getting very mad and wanted to shoot him. Then the police called to offer them a deal. The deal was if they let everyone go they…

    • 661 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    the da vinchi code

    • 2103 Words
    • 7 Pages

    With some help from a French police cryptographer, Sophie Neveau, who feels that he is being wrongly accused, he manages to escape and together they embark on a quest to find the real killer.…

    • 2103 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays

Related Topics