One of the cool things about sci-fi is that while it often starts out as futuristic, as time passes and reality catches up with fiction, going back to revisit those stories can take on an entirely different meaning. Sometimes, it’s a matter of looking back to see what some of the movies got right about our scientific advancements and wondering how they managed to “predict” the future. Other times, it’s interesting to see just how wrong we got it. And then there are movies that when we revisit them, they are somehow scarier than they were when they were first released and now, Steven Spielberg’s ambitious, Tom Cruise-starring sci-fi thriller that falls into that latter category is streaming on Hulu.
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Originally released in 2002, Minority Report is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella of the same name. Set in 2054, the film follows John Anderton (Cruise) head of the Precrime police program in which three psychics known as Precogs foresee violent crimes before they happen and those who would be responsible for them are apprehended. The team up of Spielberg and Cruise made Minority Report an eagerly anticipated film that year which resulted in it being a box office hit and even went on to get a video game and a one-season television series.
Minority Report Is More Unsettling Than Ever
What makes Minority Report one of those sci-fi movies that are even more chilling years after their release is less about reality catching up directly with the futuristic technology from the film but more how our own developing technologies could very easily be used in the same way. Law enforcement isn’t necessarily utilizing a group of psychics to predict crime and then sending special police out to arrest people before they can actually commit them, but we do live in an age where the algorithm drives just about everything and AI use is on the rise in just about every aspect of existence. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine a point where those technologies could be used to read patterns and come up with predictive data that could in turn be used to prevent crime.
While that on the surface sounds like a good idea, Minority Report stands as a reminder that it really isn’t. In the film, Anderton ends up being pre-implicated in a crime and it’s eventually revealed how the whole system can be manipulated and corrupted, resulting in justice not exactly being served. It’s the ethical questions posed by the film that have endured in the more than 20 years since it debuted and those same questions make the movie more timely and more terrifying than ever. Now, it’s streaming on Hulu so you can check it out for yourself.
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