Minority Report

Continuity mistake: Lara, wife of John, seemingly has the ability to teleport. She goes from the building where the conference is being held, to the Pre-Crime building to jail break John, and then is back at the conference in the next scene. The time to go from the conference, as the antagonist is about to start his speech, to the pre-crime building, and back to the conference as his speech is ending, seems to break the continuity of time. (02:06:21)

Plot hole: Burgess was supposedly willing to commit murder to avoid losing one precog critical to the precrime effort. Indeed, the precogs are "offline" while Agatha is unavailable. But no system dependent on a key individual can last long or be scalable. At the banquet it is suggested precrime will somehow "go national." For that to happen there would need to be a way to create more precogs, which requires creating brain-damaged children of drug addicts.

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Suggested correction: Or, in the mean time since his project's success Burgess has been able to collect the funds and influences to actually breed precogs or some other form of procuring them. In whatever way possible as Burgess is not a moral or ethical man.

lionhead

Other mistake: At the beginning of the movie, we learn that the precogs "do not see what you intend to do, only what you will do" and that they cannot see suicides. At the end, Burgess intends to kill Anderton but does not go through with it; he commits suicide instead. Given these two facts, the precogs should not have seen Burgess' confrontation with Anderton at the end, and a red ball should not have been created.

Matty Blast

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Suggested correction: Burgess intention was in fact to kill Anderton, but the knowledge of the precogs predicting his murder attempt, the conflict inside his conscious, and the sound of the arriving helicopters made him change his mind at the last second, just like Anderton did in the apartment. The point is they have a choice, and having knowledge of that, only that, changes the future and makes it different from the visions.

lionhead

Continuity mistake: When we see the Leo Crow previsions for the first time, we see the numbers "9" and "6" backwards because we are seeing the previsions from behind the screen. But in the cyberparlor we see the previsions from the same side that Anderton and Riley are watching them, and the numbers are still backward.

Matty Blast

Continuity mistake: As Witwer tells Laura about John's apartment being full of drugs, she's sitting straight up with her hands at her sides, but in the next shot she has her legs crossed and her arm on the top of the painting. (01:10:20)

Piemanmoo

Dr. Iris Hineman: Sometimes, in order to see the light, you have to risk the dark.

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Trivia: On the "subway" train, the man holding the USA Today paper is Cameron Crowe, and the woman in the seat behind him on his left is Cameron Diaz. Because "Vanilla Sky" and "Minority Report" were so close in shooting, the two directors (Crowe and Spielberg) agreed to put themselves as cameos in each other's films. (00:46:10)

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Question: OK, let's see: Lamar Burgess set Anderton up; he Hired Leo Crow and sent him to be killed in a hotel. But How did exactly Burgess plan the meeting of Anderton with Crow? Anderton arrived at the crime scene by a chain of events that began with the pre-vision of his destiny. It was clear that Lamar did not fake the pre-vision, because this became true just like it was predicted; besides, when Anderton was being chased, he arrived to crime scene by a coincidence; so what did Burguess have to do to make sure the existence of the pre-vision and this possible future? I don't see a simple solution.

Answer: Well, there isn't really a simple solution, but here goes. For a pre-vision to form, there have be two things present within the range of the precog ability (which appears to be limited to the Washington area - regardless of the stated plan to take the programme countrywide, there's never any indication that the precogs can sense beyond that range). Firstly, someone with the intent to kill. Secondly, there has to be a target for that intent within the range of the precogs. Anderton is present, and has the intent within him to kill the man who took his son, but has no target - the real kidnapper is presumably either dead or beyond the precog ability. Burgess, by bribing Crow to pretend to be that man, has provided a viable target for Anderton's intent within the range of the precog ability, thus triggering the prevision, and beginning the chain of events.

Tailkinker

The above answers the question, but there do appear to be some time travel issues with this plot point in the movie. Burgess set things up for Crow to fake being the kidnapper and thus triggering Jon's desire to kill that person, everything starts by the pre-cogs seeing the future. If the pre-cogs did not exist or did not have the vision, Jon would have never known that Leo Crow existed and would have continued on without having killed anyone. This is unique within the movie, as the other murders would have been commited regardless of whether or not the pre-cogs saw it. In this case, the ONLY reason this murder occurred is because the pre-cogs saw it.

oldbaldyone

Thinking about this a little more, it could be conceivable that Burgess had planned a different option for Jon finding Crow. We just never saw that on screen, because the precogs changed everything to an alternative future timeline once they saw the original murder. Originally, Jon could have been triggered by Burgess himself, stating that they got a lead on his son's murder and pointing him to Crow.

oldbaldyone

No I think Burgess set it up so that Anderton would find Crow because of the precogs, not have a different plan set up before or else it could be possible Burgess himself would be visible in the prevision. He manipulated the system perfectly, he has done it before after all. He knows exactly how the precogs work so he is able to set it up so that it's untraceable. Except, except for the fact there is always a choice. Only then did it go wrong for him. This proves both true for Anderton and Burgess in the end.

lionhead

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