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The robotic Spyders that swarm over an apartment block
in Minority Report are the sinister and most direct invasion
of privacy in a movie all about the horrific effects of ultimate surveillance.
It is these themes and this imagery that resonates 20 years after the film’s
release.
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The story is from Philip K. Dick, famously paranoid
acid-induced writer of the 1950s and 1960s when the Cold War and deep state
conspiracies were at fever pitch. It was also made by Steven Spielberg shortly
after 9/11, and can be read as an oblique response to the fall of the World
Trade Center.
“Pre-Crime feels attuned to the unconstitutional policies of
the George W Bush era,” Jesse Hassenger writes in The Guardian.
The Spyders creep up and scan people’s eyeballs to check
their identities — hardly a million miles from where we stand today with
fingerprint device recognition and, more insidiously, the data-scraping by
anonymous corporations of increasing amounts of our physical and digital
activity.
They are also just one part of the police surveillance
in Minority Report, an apparatus that extends to a twist on
Orwell’s 1984-style thought crime.
Set in 2054, there are eye-scanning machines mounted all
around the city, in public transit and in street billboards that “know” who is
passing and shout out personalized advertising slogans the film portrays as
invasive. Despite GDPR and other data privacy laws, the momentum toward
algorithm-driven individualized perusing and pursuing of our every move is
unstoppable.
“That tracking system is the most mundanely frightening part
of the film’s surveillance-state future, in which you might be arrested for a
crime you haven’t yet committed,” says David Sims of The
Atlantic in one of a plethora of articles commemorating the film’s
anniversary.
Even the autonomous vehicle, a sleekly designed Lexus,
diverts course to take detective on the run John Anderton (Tom Cruise) straight
to jail.
“The forward-thinking technology in the film was cooked up
by experts whom Spielberg asked to envision life five decades hence, and in
almost every case, advances in
The film may not have the bleak ending that other filmmakers
like David Fincher, for example, may have employed, but it is still a dark
depiction of a not-so-distant future
“The result is a striking cinematic portrayal of the ways
that the severe intrusion of privacy have become an irredeemable, inescapable
facet of American society,” AV Club’s Mustafa Yasar II finds.
“The fact that Spielberg has historically leaned into
sentimentality makes him especially prescient in depicting next-generation
technology; because as Anderton demonstrates, it’s the intimacy — and power — of
emotion which ultimately may mark the right (or wrong) choice between seemingly
predestined futures.”
Minority Report has a lot to answer for, not least the
stimulus given to a million articles like this one about the future of the
human-machine interface. Elsewhere in the film, Anderton controls the pre-cog
“memory” sequence using a slick air interface and virtual monitors.
Voice and gesture commands are the likely evolution of the
way we connect to the internet — and just one jump away from controlling our
interaction with the digital world by thought alone. Elon Musk is putting chips
into chimpanzee brains as a precursor to jacking us all into the Matrix.
One thing the film didn’t get right is its use of still
photos. As Sharon Knolle points out in The Wrap, Anderton is
convinced that Leo Crow is the man who abducted his son when he finds a trove
of photos of children. Colin Farrell’s character is rightly suspicious of the
planted pics, but we’re also doubtful that print photos will still be as much
of a thing in 2054. In 2022, most people — even police looking for victims or
suspects — carry those photos on their phones.
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