Minority Report: The Book vs the Movie Essay example -- compare/contr

It is a fool-proof system natural to ensure unequivocal safetybut when it crumbles, would you go against everything it stands for and to save it? This is the platform that Philip K. Dick, fountain of the sci-fi short story The Minority Report (MR), has given us. Set in a futuristic New York City, we see Police Commissioner John A. Anderton as the founding father of a promising new branch of policing Precrime, a system that uses Precogs (mutated and retarded oracles) to predict all future crimes. However, the system appears to backfire when Anderton himself is impeach to kill a man hes never even heard of. The word picture adaptation by the same name also centers on a younger Chief Anderton, a respected employee of Precrime, predicted to murder a drop off stranger who he was unaware existed. Amidst scandal, betrayal, and distrust, both Andertons must run from the jurist system theyve worked so hard to put in place, and admit to themselves, as well as to society, that a perfect system cannot be born of imperfect humans. Though the basis of the films plot and major conflict stayed full-strength to the storys, many changes were made to the personalities and roles of the characters, as well as the nature and circumstance of the briny conflict and the sub-conflicts.Dick presents our main character, Commissioner John Anderton, as the balding, pot-bellied founder of a revolutionary new crime detection system whos been presentation his years for longer than hed care to remember. In the short story, he has just acquired a new assistant, Ed Witwer, and fears being replaced by the younger man. In the beginning, Anderton is portrayed as slightly insecure about his job (to the speckle of near paranoia of being set-up), as well as his importance to society, though by the e... ...d. While in MR, Anderton is nerve-racking to accept the inevitability of reticent and what may be his less useful future, in the movie, much of his jumble is with his past, and the gui lt he feels. His conflicts still revolve around evading Witwer and Lamar, whether to murder to sustain murder, and his own inner turmoil. Though the similarities in the most obvious conflicts, those surrounded by Anderton and Kaplan, the protagonist and antagonist, and fate remain intact, it is obvious that Philip Dicks story has been expanded upon and the main characters made to fit the big screen. Both stories, however, address the contradictions and repercussions of trying to encourage free will and safety in an ultimately determine setting, the basic moral conflict of destroying what is meant to represent a utopian security, as well as the issue of trading freedom for protection.