Movie adaptations of science fiction short stories often have a way of missing the point. Sometimes it's an improvement, sometimes it isn't.
The bit about Minority Report that I didn't like (and I think this point was made by somebody else at the time but I can't remember who it was) is as follows: the movie starts off by saying "Let's suppose that there's some psychic system that allows us to predict crimes before they occur!" "Gee okay movie" I say, "that sounds pretty implausible but I'll go along with it". "And then" says the movie "the big twist at the end is.... sometimes it doesn't work!"
It feels like a cheap sort of ending because, well, I never would have thought it could work until the logic of the story demanded it. It feels like the movie is trying to make some kind of point about free will, but it's not only keeping its thumb on the scale, it's also keeping its other thumb on the other side of the scale, making the discussion pointless. Free will is nonexistent, it says, because of this hypothetical device which could never exist in the real world. Except, oh wait, the device doesn't work because there's free will. The end.
The last scene of the movie demonstrates that knowing that a pre-crime report was generated does allow the future to be changed (Burgess chooses to shoot himself, rather than Tom Cruise). The earlier plotline had suggested there was no way to escape fate - the protagonist ends up committing the exact killing he had been desperately trying to avoid (a la Oedipus Rex).
At the time the film came out, I was in a long involved argument about the theme of the film on screenwriting board.
There, I said:
"The issue of her predicting the future as it actually ends up taking place is more or less irrelevant in terms of the story the filmmakers chose to tell. That's set up from the very first precognition and subsequent raid. Agatha sees a murder that does not happen, because there is interevention. The premise underlying the story the filmmakers chose to tell us is that what she sees will in fact occur if we do not stop it. We are free to stop it, of course, but only because we know it is coming. If we didn't know, the world would continue on the rails it has been traveling on, and it would arrive at the destination Agatha has foreseen. This is the essential point that you have to buy into for the premise to work at all."
I dig a little deeper here, including analysis of the eye transplant scene. With a bit of a snarky tone, but I was arguing with friends...
The story was fundamentally predicated on the assumption that the precognitive telepaths worked as advertised, but that the director's knowledge of their data combined with a data error causing them to take each others' output as input created an artifical scenario that could only really affect that one person. The film, on the other hand, turned them into a fundamentally flawed system that didn't and couldn't actually work; the minority report was removed, the concept of them feeding off each others' data was removed and we were left with nothing more than a motiveless, random crime being incorrectly predicted. Which, to me, completely undermined the point of the exercise.
