Minority Report question & spoiler

May 8, 2007 4:18 AM

Minority Report question & spoiler . . .

Apparently I am dense or the plot does not hang together. I did not get Max Von Snydow character's motive for setting up Tom Cruise's character. Did he have a motive and I missed it? Or was the plot basic bogus? Maybe it was some kind of postmodern surreal allegory about how human motivation morphs into the inexplicable in 2060?

posted by bukvich to Media & Arts (9 answers total)

I recommend you read the short story - I also found the movie weirdly incomprehensible, but the story is much clearer. In case you didn't know, it's by Philip K Dick. A shorter, less clear, and less fun route is to read the wikipedia page for the movie.
posted by jacalata at 4:46 AM on May 8, 2007

What happened was that Tom Cruise was in a state such that he would find out that Snydow killed that one woman by drowning her in the lake (Anne Lively). She would have prevented the whole precog program because her daughter was the best precog and she wanted her back. Snydow had to kill her to keep the program running and, when he realized that Cruise was on track to figure it out, he had to kill her too. I'm pretty sure that's right.
Your friend for this kind of stuff.
posted by shokod at 5:09 AM on May 8, 2007

Shortly before Tom retrieves the pre-cogs' memories of himself committing the murder, he sees an old "memory" of a woman being drowned. He's not familiar with it, so he goes to the memory bank and asks the operator about it. I always assumed that it was this nosiness that made Max decide that he was "getting too close" or some such and that he had to be taken out.

At least, that's how I've always interpreted it. The one problem with this interpretation is how much time elapses between Tom inquiring about the drowned woman and retrieving the memory of the murder he commits. It didn't seem like enough time for Max to prepare an elaborate frame-up, but perhaps they left things vague intentionally, or perhaps scenes were cut.
posted by Johnny Assay at 5:11 AM on May 8, 2007

shokod's got it. von Sydow's character tricks the precogs when he kills the woman by replicating the fake attempted murder, which the precogs saw as an echo. Tom Cruise was starting to figure it out, which would put the whole program in jeopardy.
posted by mkultra at 6:22 AM on May 8, 2007

I think the actual plot hole is: so how exactly did von Sydow's character frame Cruise? By leaving a pile of photos in the middle of a bed? Cruise's character would have had no reason to be in that room if he hadn't seen the precog's prediction, but he wouldn't have seen their prediction if he wasn't going to be in that room. I know that that's the time paradox of it all, but the thing is -- von Sydow's character, knowing only what he knew at the time, could never expected that putting some photos and a potential victim in some random room would in any way be expected to lead to Cruise's character ever being there. Unless I'm missing something?
posted by svenx at 7:27 AM on May 8, 2007

svenx, good point.

The mundane answer would be that von Sydow had simply planned to lead Cruise to the room by some other means.

The cool sci-fi answer would be that von Sydow planned to kill the victim himself. He hatches this scheme to frame Cruise, and thinks to himself, "If for some reason it doesn't work out, I fully intend to shoot this guy in this room at a certain time." By the assumptions of the whole precog thing, wouldn't that intention alone cause them to foresee it?

But yeah, the most likely answer would be that the screenwriters didn't really think it through.
posted by staggernation at 8:05 AM on May 8, 2007

I also contend that the end of Minority Report is very likely a dream. (Although I've been told that Spielberg has specifically denied this.)
posted by blueshammer at 2:22 PM on May 8, 2007

Also, von Sydow has to frame somebody - the precogs have to see somebody committing the crime, or they'll see von Sydow. So he was looking for somebody to frame, to begin with.

(blueshammer, I didn't realize we weren't supposed to think it was a dream, it was so obviously a dream.)
posted by joannemerriam at 2:46 PM on May 8, 2007

Hmm. It actually didn't occur to me that it was a dream, because it seemed so obviously to be a Hollywood Happy Ending, tacked on because someone deemed the first, completely appropriate ending too much of a downer. If it's a wish-fulfullment dream for Cruise, why doesn't his son turn up alive?

I actually loved the movie, which I think has been widely underappreciated. Not without flaws, of course (Campy Plant Lady comes to mind), but it's one of the rare sci-fi movies that has enough confidence in its imagined future world to toss out countless compelling details about that world without lingering to hit you over the head with each one. I was totally on board, up and until the story ended and the movie didn't.
posted by staggernation at 3:26 PM on May 8, 2007