Kyle’s Review

I didn’t know what to expect with Minority Report: a TV series set after the events of the movie of the same name, based on a Phillip K. Dick short story. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the short story or movie, I’ll give you the cliff notes version here. Disregard the next paragraph if you’re already familiar with the story.

Children, born of junkies of a future drug, are given therapy and it turns out that the chemical cocktail running through their veins gives the kids precognition. This precognition is limited to future murders within a 100 mile radius of the children’s location and thus Precrime is born. Precrime would bust murders before they killed and everything worked well until one man was setup for a murder and the director of Precrime was revealed as a fraud. Precrime was disbanded and the children, now adults, were sent to live out their days on a farm in the middle of nowhere.

One of the precogs (one of the three children, now adults, who have precognition) can’t take solitude anymore. The precog Dash returns to Washington DC to use his abilities to stop crime before it begins. Unfortunately, Dash is one of the twin precogs, so he only possesses half the precognitive powers: Dash sees what happens, while his twin Arthur knows the names. That’s the setup for the Minority Report TV series and it’s a pretty interesting one. But I find it convenient that the one twin who can see the crimes, but not the names, is the one swinging into action. Arthur, Dash’s twin who can pull names, has turned sleazy and adds a twist to the precog dynamic, and Agatha, the strongest of the precogs and the focus of the movie, would’ve had too many powers and the episodes would’ve wrapped up without a hitch. Like I said, it’s convenient.

Minority Report’s visuals are phenomenal. The special and practical effects capture the feel of the film, but the acting and goofy dialogue exchanges leave a lot to be desired. Minority Report did have some ah moments. I wondered what Wilmer Valderama (Fez from That 70s Show) was up to. At one point, Dash was watching an advertisement for The Simpsons’ 75^th anniversary. Lord, I hope The Simpsons doesn’t last that long; the original cast couldn’t still be on the show 50 years in the future. Anyway, Minority Report has plenty of Easter Eggs. I just wished it had more substance. Before the show premiered, I wondered if there was any more story left to tell. It appears as if the Minority Report TV show is scrapping the little it can.

Perhaps it’s because I watched Blindspot on the same night, but I can’t help but compare Minority Report to Blindspot. Both shows suffer some of the same flaws (flat writing and acting), but Jaimie Alexander’s performance in Blindspot places her show ahead of Minority Report.

Verdict:

Minority Report is visually stunning and it has as many Easter Eggs as a Marvel movie, but I may not be watching it for long. It needs to show that there’s more to it than a heavy dose of nostalgia.