Movie Gadget Friday: The Pre-Crime Analytical Wing from Minority Report

For the last Movie Gadget Friday Josie Fraser checked out the Babel fish The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for this week's installment she looks at the Pre-Crime Analytical Wing from Minority Report:

Let's not complain that Steven Spielberg's 2002 film Minority Report isn't very good, particularly when it sits between AI and The Terminal. And lets not be too bitter about the fact that it has little resemblance to the 1956 Philip K. Dick short of the same name, especially as the next movie to come limping out of the P.K. Dick adaptation/crippling stable was John Woo's all-time career low Paycheck. Let's be positive and concentrate on how Minority Report is super rich in gadget-goodness, which means this week's feature has a cluster of them to feast upon.

The futurist think tank employed by Spielberg to dream up a brave new world came up with some pretty neat ideas, including personalised advertising triggered by casual, public retinal scanning and tracking; swarms of mechanical spiders designed to carry out systematic and thorough police searches; and the MAG-LEV (magnetic levitation) road system which allows vehicles to travel at accident-free high speeds, horizontally as well as vertically, across the city,

The Pre-Crime Analytical Wing comes from the original story and is a unique set of gadgets both in film gadget history and within the narrative of the movie, due to its organic and non replaceable components � namely three shaved idiots in a bath tub of soapy liquid � a mechanism that brings a whole new angle to the concept of immersive computing environments.

These �pre-cognitive� idiot-savants are the genetically altered psychic children of drug addicts who float in a giant nutritious soup bath all day, every day, over hearing the futures grisly deaths of the cities inhabitants. The Pre-Crime analytical wing has been built around the precogs soup-assisted ability to channel future murders. Their visions are projected across the huge screen of the data CAVE (Configurable Automatic Virtual Environment). A crack team of detectives, lead by drug riddled obsessive Detective John Anderton (Tom Cruise) manipulate the precogs data stream using a physical computer language � so they look like they get to play an eye-toy game of someones impending murder for a living.

As well as the data CAVE, the precogs are hooked up to an archaic and extremely unlucky form of lottery machine � if your name appears psychically burnt into a wooden ball, you�re going to be arrested and put away for an extremely long time � without having actually committed, or even considered any criminal act.

Remember citizens, it�s your duty to continue to Vote Yes for Pre-Crime!

[Tweaq @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

HEY! I liked the movie; it was great. The gloves for the screen were cool too.

[Tweaq @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

Worse...if its a red ball, your dead.

[egarc @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

I liked the movie and the gadget goodness. I especially liked the cell phones.

[Isaac Marchionna @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

As futuristic as some of this stuff is, it's amazing given rear projection and what you can do with that new LCD glass. If you look at the sequence when Tom Cruise is understanding the Precog's vision, by scrubbing through video that is semi-holographic that stuff isn't too far off. Having had a chance to work on some of the LCD glass that can turn opaque and then by throwing an image on to that glass, you get a very weird and transparent image. Throw in a 3D mouse and in the future some LCD glass that can be curved you make for some really bizzare graphical display systems.

Also, come on, you guys forgot the "sick sticks"! Best non-lethal weapon...EVER!

[Adrian @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

I thought it was pretty good, too! I agree it didn't compare favorably to the original short story, but most movies don't. (Starship troopers, anyone?)

As far as the tech goes, while I can't offer any suggestions on psychic idiot savants, you can pick up some of the gesture-laden input goodness with Fingerworks' keyboards. (http://www.fingerworks.com) My wife got one for her carpal tunnel syndrome, but she really enjoys the additional functionality that the gestures provide. (Example, twist left like you're unscrewing a jar to close a document, twist right to open, etc)

[Cosine @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

"Worse...if its a red ball, your dead."

Your dead what?

Funny that a detached eyeball works for biometircs in the future when it doesn't work now if detached...

[Will @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

Soon after I saw this a friend of mine's car was stolen. We went to the police station where we were seperated by the woman who took our report by a large sheet of bullet proof glass.
The glass reminded us of the Analitical wall and we mused about how "if this was minority report" she would just be able to call up digital picture all of the recently found. and then use her groovy glove to sort them around until we found the red carolla we were looking for.

As the woman (she was not a police officer but some sort of civilian clerk) looked for a pen, and then a pen that worked, and then the proper form, we realized that the biggest problem with this movie is that it is supposed to be only 50 years in the future. From the way the things look down at the Santa Monica Police station, I am guessing it will be 50 years before they get a computer with a mouse, much less radicaly change the way we visually minipulate data.

The other thing I though was funny was the way that the wall could do all that cool stuff and then tom cruse had toput the data onto a gigantic media card and sneaker-net it across the room to the other work station. No wireless in 2053?

[Dee @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

You're SO wrong about Minority Report. It's very, very good film that grows with you over time.

[Foof @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

"Worse...if its a red ball, your dead."

Wrong on both counts. Since they had acheived a zero-percent murder rate, getting a red ball pretty much guarantees you WON'T be dead, at least of homicide.

I wonder, shouldn't this system also pick up accidental deaths, or at least manslaughter? Those wouldn't justify going into permanent cyber-jail right?

[tf @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

Worst tech design ever: an ultra-sophisticated projection screen, but the actual perpetrators and victims are "printed" on wooden balls that corkscrew down a ramp like gumballs in those large machines at the mall. Why? Because Spielberg thought it would look good and he had to figure out how to have a "tense" scene where Cruise was still in the room, yet they hadn't realized what he already knew?? Retarded.

By comparison, Paycheck was brilliant. Yes, the acting completely sucked and the narrative was forced, but in terms of dragging out a Dick short story to movie length, it was more successful and accurate than Screamers, Total Recall, or Minority Report.

Not saying I liked it understand, just thought the whole oldschool/newschool integration to the device was retarded. And why didn't SS have the balls to make the pre-cogs mutated, withered little midgets? At least, he could have made them Schiavo-like.

Let's hope A Scanner Darkly is not completely killed by the animation... and Keanu... and Winona... what am I talking about... Ever since Bladerunner did it nearly right, everyone else has been forced to do it so, so wrong.

[CDM @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

How about "Let's not write an article where you make blanket statements about the fans/hater of the movie"?

[Sean @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

I think the wooden balls were used because there wasn't any chance of one matching another due to the change in the patterns in the grain. Maybe they were trying to avoid forgeries.

[asdf @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

Actually, the reason for the wooden ball was to prevent fraud. It was asserted that the grain pattern on the organic wood was soley unique, and thus preventing anyone from walking in and carving whatever name they pleased.

[Deadpan @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

What irked me wasn't the fact the he used a dead eyeball to break in, but that alarms didn't go off THE SECOND he attempted to open the door with it. So much for security.

[Minuk @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

What's the writer talking about? Minority report has as 7.7/10 rating on IMDB http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/ and a whopping 92% Fresh Rating on Rotten Tomatoes http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/minority_report/

If it didn't tickle his fancy, that's all in good, but don't try to pass it off like it was a bad movie that everyone dislikes.

[Foof @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

What if someone commonly goes only by a nickname? What happens when a woman gets married?
What if someone spells their name differenty every time?
If they don't have an English name (does the wooden ball support Unicode?)

Carving names was a minor but irking point. I think the pre-cogs should just have outputted a fuzzy image of the victim/perp that they matched up in a database of all known citizens...

[drzaius @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

Err, Bladerunner is great and gorgeous film but did not "do everything right." In fact, it took a complex mind-bending and character driven sci-fi tale and turned it into a detective movie. Sure, its a good near-future detective movie but as far staying true to PKDs story, it failed badly. In fact, Scott didn't want to do a piece on the existential problems of an android hunter with a bad marriage and the implications of Mercerism.

A Scanner Darkly on the other hand, from what I've read, is trying very hard to use the PKD story as its plot and not to dumb it down into a detective or action movie. Considering how messed up Arctor is through most of the book I would welcome, not dismiss, the animation.

While I'm at it, Minority Report is considered by the masses and critics alike to far outshine AI and just about most sci-fi movies. Check its ratings at rotten tomatoes. AI was just a mess of a movie trying to be 20 different things at once without successfully doing any one of them very well.

[striegs @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

Personally, the coolest gadget in that movie had to be that spinny sonic pulse pistol thingy that you reloaded by spinning around. Forget paintball, that would be sweet.

[egarc @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

Paycheck kind of reminded me of The A-Team. A LOT of shots were fired but somehow Ben was never hit. Too bad...

[palmer eldritch @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

The clever glass / driving glove combination was only in there so that Cruise could point out the pre-criminal by making his hand like a gun. Without that it'd be quite cool, IMHO.

When the animated advertising on the cereal packets in that film finally arrive in real life there's going to be trouble, though. Scanning your eyeballs to ask you about your pants is one thing - talking boxes of cheerios? That's a weapon of mass destruction.

[reverb @ Dec 19th 2005 12:12AM]

this does not relate to the gadgets, but the thing that drives me nuts about this movie, and i'll have to read the story to see if it has the same problem--haven't gotten around to that yet, is that it has a fatal flaw of logic. if anderson is being framed, and the precogs see the most likely future, then one would have to be able to manipulate the precogs' visions and make them see anderson commiting murder. otherwise, the precogs are seeing something IN ORDER that it may happen. think about it, if there's no vision of him doing the crime, he never goes and does it. self-fulfilling prophecy, which seems the exact opposite of the point of the precogs. they see the most likely course of events, right, so why would they see something that wouldn't happen, UNLESS THEY SEE IT? if there's a flaw in my logic, please point it out.

i really enjoyed this movie when i saw it, btw, but about 20 mins after i left the theater this problem occurred to me and i lost a lot of respect for the movie.