 If you guys are anything like me, at all, then you probably enjoy analyzing movies and shows and whatnot for any sort of deeper themes and meanings that they may have. Sci-Fi is a very good genre in which to do this, meaning that as much as you're to look at a sci-fi film or show and try to extrapolate whatever meaning the showrunners or filmmakers want there to be. Now, I enjoy a good dumb action movie as much as the next guy. I'm a massive fan of the entire MCU, which pretty much are all just dumb action films. So I'm not saying that you have to, like, and enjoy movies to understand deeper meanings every time, but it is a lot of fun to go into, at least for me. So with that all in mind, today, let's take a look at the movie Minority Report. Minority Report was released in 2002, I think? If I'm wrong, that's gonna appear somewhere on the screen, but it's based off the short story by the same name. The movie follows John, something or other, played by Tom Cruise. The basic plot of the film is that John gets blamed or basically framed somehow for a crime that he hasn't yet committed, and he is basically trying to prove that he's not going to commit the crime or find out what the hell's going on with that. And the reason I say that he has been convicted or assumed that he's going to do a crime that he hasn't committed is because in this world, there are the Precogs, a group of three psychic children, basically, who are able to predict crime before it occurs. So an entire crime unit has existed for six years by the start of this film, known as the Pre-Crime Unit. Their entire job is to stop crime before it occurs. The only problem with this is that if you are stopping a crime before it happens, it doesn't happen. You have changed the course of history and you have changed the future. So what do you do because you have now altered that? This movie does take an interesting look into the idea of are we destined for some grand fate that we can't stop without the intervention of others, or are we able to change our future just based on information that we know is going to happen? And the movie actually takes a few interesting looks at this, more towards the beginning and end and how that changes over the course of this film. Earlier on in the film, we are introduced to a character played by Colin Farrell. He works for the FBI and is personally trying to figure out whether or not Pre-Crime is a good or bad thing for the rest of the United States, as they want to implement this across the country to eliminate murder. The thing is, the Precogs can only detect murder. The Precogs are unable to detect rape, theft, anything along those lines. The explanation for that being that murder is the most harmful act that one human can do to another. Though with that explanation, you would really think that something like rape would show up. But, I dug the rest, but Colin Farrell's character makes an argument. He says that if you stop a crime before it happens, does it actually happen? They counter the argument with, but it was going to and it always was. We know this for a fact because they saw it, but you are still changing the course of events. To try and further his point, John picks up a ball and rolls it across the table. Colin Farrell catches it before it hits the ground and he says, why did you catch it? When he responds with, because it was going to hit the ground, he says, hmm, but how do you know? You stopped it from happening, which is his basic argument. You know the trajectory for what is going to occur, so stopping it from happening doesn't mean that it wouldn't have occurred if you didn't interfere. The argument here being something along the lines of a predestination type of deal, where your event is always going to occur unless something somehow interacts to directly stop it from occurring. Now, the other side of this is, are you able to stop events by yourself if you know that they are going to occur? And that is actually what the rest of the movie, after the preceding incident, basically tries to answer. Like I said, the preceding incident with the film is that John gets seen by the precogs doing a crime that he would never do to someone he doesn't know. Then John runs away from pre-crime because he would never commit a crime like this. He doesn't even know the guy, why would he murder him? Which is interesting to me because at the beginning of the film, he seems to have such a conviction that the precogs are never wrong and have never made a wrong prediction in their entire lives. Yet his immediate reaction upon being accused is, goes out of his way to find the person that basically helped invent, kind of found basically, the precogs to find out if the system is in fact fallible. Because, you know, basing shit off of fucking guesses of what could occur in the future, you know, is bullshit and, you know, is bad and shouldn't in fact be counted towards fucking anything. I'm sorry, just the levels of almost hypocrisy from John at this moment kind of blew my mind. Like his first response was an, oh, guess I'm gonna go quietly because I literally have witnessed myself doing the murder and this is a system that I wholeheartedly and infallibly have trusted up to this point. No, his first response is, find the person that helped make the precogs and helped prove my innocence. Yeah, but after that moment, after he does the whole, I will prove it, I'm innocent thing and goes on the run, but he eventually ends up kidnapping one of the precogs to help him, the most powerful of the three, Agatha. From here, the movie takes a different turn. Agatha is constantly telling John that he can change his future. He can change the way things are going to play out. He can change the course of all everything. She pleads with him not to do the crime that she thinks he's going to do, that he believes he's destined to perform. She begs him not to shoot this guy. And in the end, he doesn't. Spoiler alert, by the way, if you haven't seen Minority Report, though, if you're watching a breakdown of the themes of Minority Report, I presume you've seen Minority Report, but she begs him not to kill him and he doesn't. He changes his own history and changes the course of his future through his own will because he doesn't want to be that person. He doesn't want to be the guy to kill someone. The end of the movie also helps reinforce this idea. The guy who basically framed John, who started the whole pre-crime thing, he is found out to have murdered someone using the system to his advantage. And in the end, John basically tells him, you have to shoot me and prove that your system works 100% infallibly every time, or don't shoot me and prove that it's not so infallible and it can't totally be trusted. And the guy takes the route of killing himself as opposed to John. It was a powerful moment, but it also kind of takes my account and you can change how your destiny, how your future is supposed to play out if you know what is going to occur. I personally view this film as saying that you can take and do with your future what you want. Don't let others tell you what you can and cannot do. Your future is what you want to do with it. No one else can tell you how you are supposed to live your life or how you are supposed to act. It is a powerful message for me as someone who, for the longest time, I had this idea that I had to act a certain way. I had to basically go down this route of following my father's footsteps, join the Coast Guard, become a lawyer, something along those lines, or get a normal job, do what society typically expects of me. I grew up in a time before content creation and YouTube was a possibility or even an avenue. I never even considered making movies or films prior to this. But when I was about 16, I found a love of filmmaking, of prop building, filming videos, editing things. And I can just follow that for the past year and a half of just doing videos. So the fact that this movie basically takes and gives a message of, you can do whatever you want with your life. No one else has to control it or take it from you and force you down a certain path that you don't want to go on is extremely reassuring and I love that message oh so very much. And if you take anything away from this, it's that my personal opinion on the film is that the message is you can do whatever you want with it and that's how I've always viewed the film. You can do whatever you want with your life. You don't have to listen to some inane societal thing and force you down a path you don't want to take. Do what you want. Okay, that got a little more philosophical towards the end that I meant it to. But back to the themes. Basically, the themes that I've always taken away from this are be who you want to be. Don't let others control what you want to do with your life. No matter how your life seems to be going, you have a chance to make it better, make yourself better. Put yourself on a path that is different from what society or anyone else expects of you. And so if you take anything away from this video, please, please let it be that you can be whoever the hell you want to be. Don't let anyone force you to be someone you're not because that is not living to your true self or being who you want to be. And that is not a fun way for anyone to live and I don't think anyone should be forced to live that way. Well, that video was different and a little more philosophical than I initially intended it to be. Yep. Anyway, guys, I hope that you enjoyed that video. If you did watch all the way to the end, thank you very much. I know this is a little bit different content than I've put on my channel, but I like analytical breakdowns of things and so I wanted to do an analytical breakdown of a movie that I greatly, greatly enjoy. If you do watch all the way to the end, hi, thank you very much. I hope that you enjoyed the entirety of this video. If you want to follow me on social media, links to both my Twitter and Instagram will be in the links down below. Though I do warn you, I don't post a ton of stuff to either my Instagram or my Twitter. I'm not super active just because of who I am. But if I get more active, yeah. Anyway, if you would like to see more content from me in the future, hit the subscribe button to stay up to date with everything that I do here. If you'd like to watch any more of my videos, typically reviews, I'll leave an entire link to my movie review playlist that I call the Critical Reviews right up there. If you'd like to see my review specifically of this movie, the one that I've been discussing now, Minority Report, I will leave a link to that right there. That's all I have for now, guys. I hope that you all have a great fucking day and as always, peace out, guys.