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P.K. Dick’s The Minority Report and Steven Spielberg’s The Minority Report

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P.K. Dick’s The Minority Report and Steven Spielberg’s The Minority Report

Death can occur in four ways. A person can die from a physical illness, viruses and infections. A person can die from an accident. A person can commit suicide. Finally a person can be murdered by another person. What if murders could be prevented? In P.K. Dick’s story The Minority Report, and in Spielberg’s film The Minority Report, the future can be altered by using incredible technology. The success of Spielberg’s adaptation of Dick’s short story to film can be determined by the way each was presented.

While giving a tour or precrime to Edward Witwer, the main character John Anderton finds the he is supposed to kill a person he never met Leopold …show more content…

The Minority Report by Spielberg is about a one man conspiracy to keep pre crime up and running. In the book by Dick, there is a larger conspiracy to destroy precrime. The final results are opposite as well; in the book precrime was maintained and still operational. In the movie, precrime was shut down and destroyed. The methods of precrime are also different. In the book, there are three precogs which mutter an indecipherable language, which a machine interprets into images of a murder. Then a card comes out of the machine with the name of the killer and name of the victim on it. Spielberg made a more modern method out of this. In the movie, images are taken directly from the three precogs brain and then interpreted by a person who tries to find out the location of the murder. Also there are two wooden balls made, one with the name of the killer and the other with the name of the victim, on them. The movie also goes deeper into the creation of precrime, how crack babies whom had an odd gift/curse of dreaming of murder became used to prevent murder. It also shows why Anderton joined precrime, to make sure no one else would suffer like he did when he lost his son. The precogs in the book and movie are very different. First off their names in the book are Donna, Jerry and Mike. In the movie their names are Agatha, Arthur and Dashiell. The movie also involves the precogs, or at least one of them, more into the story.

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