In the year 2054,Washington D.C. is a National PreCrime Intiative created to lower the growing homicide rate. The PreCrime system utilized advanced technology and Pre-cognitives ("Pre-Cogs") --human beings able to visualize crimes before they occurred--to prevent murder. In the film, there were three Pre-Cogs that acted as a hive-mind: Agatha--the strongest--and twins, Arthur and Dashiell. Each worked together to provide the names of the victim and killers, in addition to the date of the crime. The location was not provided but PreCrime employees worked to determine it by "scrubbing" the images Pre-Cogs provided. In other terms, looking for clues as to where the murder would occur in videos and images.
The main characters in Minority Report were John Anderton (left) and Danny Witwer (right). Anderton was the protagonist of the film and a firm supporter of the PreCrime Intiative after his son was kidnapped and killed. Similarily, Witwer's father was shot and killed which encouraged him to seek to prevent crime. Despite this, he believed there was a fundamental issue with the PreCrime Initiative. In fact, during an altercation with Anderton, Witwaker stated, "it's not the future if you stop it." In which Anderton responded, "the fact that you prevented it from happening doesn't change the fact that it was going to happen" (Minority Report). To add, the "it" they were referring to was crime.
While Anderton's goal was to prevent murder, the film's conflict was revealed when a PreCog had a vision of him killing a man. From this moment on, Anderton went on the run to prevent his capture and indictment for murder. During his journey, much was revealed about the film's world. For starters, individuals in D.C. were constantly tracked by retinal scanners. The scanners were located relatively everywhere and could recall individuals' names, personal information, and even their last purchases at convenience stores. Because of this, a new market for eye-swap procedures was created. For a couple thousand dollars, people could swap their eyes out to fool the retinal scanners. Anderton was forced to undergo this procedure to stop PreCrime officers from tracking him.
Throughout the film, fundamental flaws in the PreCrime system were revealed. For example, the PreCogs often saw different versions of a crime or replayed the same crime multiple times. This replaying of a crime was similar to déjà vu. When this occurred, PreCrime employees were instructed to destroy the "Minority Reports" of the crime and move on. This allowed the film's antagonist, Lamar Burgess, to get away with several instances of murder. All that was needed was for him to confuse the PreCrime employees by disguising his acts as PreCog déjà vu rather than unique crime. When this was revealed, the flaws of the PreCrime system were made clear and the intiative was abandoned. Those imprisoned due to it were pardoned and released, not without being monitored for the years to come after. In addition, the PreCogs was sent to an undisclosed location to live out their lives in peace.
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