FOX’s Minority Report comes out with a flashy premiere in its followup to the 2002 movie staring Tom Cruise, but does it have the staying power and appeal of its predecessor?
Minority Report takes place in 2065, eleven years after the 2002 film of the same name. After the events of the movie, the pre-cog program was disbanded and the pre-cogs, Twins Dash and Arthur (Stark Sands and Nick Zano) and Agatha (Laura Regan) all hide away in a remote spot outside of Washington DC for a decade. The show follows the youngest sibling Dash as his thirst for using his gift to help people leads him to assisting the quick thinking Detective Lara Vega (Meagan Good) to help prevent crimes.
To be fair, I had my reservations about a show based on a movie, especially a movie that was pretty well defined on its own and based on a short story from 1956. Often in the case of television tie ins, there will be an overabundance of references and call-backs to the source movie that it is just tiring and annoying.
Fortunately for Minority Report, they’ve kept the nostalgia down to a minimum, but unfortunately, they’ve not kept the wonder that the original film provided.
The most interesting aspect of the show so far is learning a bit about the aftermath of the original film. With the dismantling of the pre-crime program, all former pre-crime prisoners are now released, but not without costs. Years of incarceration with psychic halo suppression has all but destroyed all of their minds, leaving all the former prisoners to live out their lives in the OpenVista mental institution. Seemingly though, some of the prisoners retain some of the cognitive ability, and their thirst for revenge will likely be a source of foes for the series, similarly to Arkham in the Batman universe.
On another note, in the pilot episode we get an extremely heavy dose of future 2065 technology, most of which is based on technology that’s not too far remote from today. Vega’s smart contacts (based on a fast forwarded Google Glass/Contacts idea) are always recording and interfaces with police drones to give her a first person view. Drones of all different types, from Prometheus style building scanning to selfie capture drones, are common place now. The most gratuitous show of technology has to be the police data analysis room though, with never ending use of the multi-touch video interfacing that was so iconic from the film.
Overall though, I’m not sure if the show will really be able to find its identity. Minority Report seems to be part sci-fi thriller desperately trying to pull from the tension of knowing a partial future, but at the same time forcing itself into a crime of the week drama combining a civilian and a detective. It’s not a revolutionary formula, and unless the show can decide what direction it goes with, it may just float aimlessly between the two as a retreaded and generic crime series.
Other Observations
- The Simpsons 75th season spectacular. It wouldn’t even surprise me that this could very well happen.
- “When I was your age, we had this thing called tinder..it’s how I met your father.”
- “Trouble” by Iggy Azalea, an already Motown sounding track, is considered classic vintage. It’s admittedly a brilliant selection to give a feel of what we considered vintage to us yet still be modern to us (and vintage to them).
- Pre-Cog Arthur uses his abilities to become a playboy real-esate tycoon / blackmarket information dealer.
- Hawkeye system monitors all data traffic from citizens to predict crimes, which is a constant fear of privacy advocates today.
- I would eat the hell out of healthy french fries.
