SOURCE: O'Brien, Geoffrey. “Prospero on the Run.” New York Review of Books 49, no. 113 (15 August 2002): 21-2.

In the following review, O'Brien examines the function of technology in Minority Report and places the film within the context of other large-scale futurological melodramas.

Philip K. Dick's short story “The Minority Report,” which was first published in the magazine Fantastic Universe in 1956, posits a future America in which crime has been virtually abolished through the employment of mentally retarded people—“gibbering, fumbling creatures, with … enlarged heads and wasted bodies”—who possess the wild talent of seeing crimes before they happen. Wired to a network of computers, the “pre-cogs” transmit visions of future events, on the basis of which future criminals are arrested and incarcerated in a vast detention camp.

The story's tricky but oddly perfunctory narrative hook—the director of the Precrime program is himself fingered by the pre-cogs as a future...