> A more open-ended ending would have been fine, as would this same ending with more exploration of the pertinent moral questions.
>
> Yeah, well, maybe I'm allowing my personal biases to slip into my analysis, but I'm not sure I would have been entirely happy with a more ambigous ending (though it would have been preferable to what we got).

For clarification, I don't mean open-ended from a story standpoint. Sometimes stories with open ends are well-placed (Barton Fink and Short Cuts, both films on my Top 10 of the 1990s list spring to mind), but generally I am more satisfied by solid story conclusions. I think I meant to say "open-minded," i.e., not taking a moral stance but still exploring the issues enough to encourage us to think about them and formulate our own conclusions.

It depends on the movie, what's preferable. Minority Report takes a stand, and that could have worked if it had explored the issues enough to have built the ground it stands on. Alternately, it could have explored the issues but pulled back from making firm conclusions. In this latter case, I think it could get away with slightly less depth than it takes to succeed in the former case. Minority Report probably would have been sufficient, though not ideal, with merely a slightly altered closing narration.

Throughout his career, Spielberg has made philosophical movies both ways. He more often takes a side, as with Minority Report, but consider Saving Private Ryan, a movie that raises not just one moral question but several and, as far as I can tell, answers none. For exploring abstract moral issues, Ryan is Spielberg's most notable work, which makes me wonder if Minority Report would have worked better with a less ethically conclusive ending.

But if the foundation is built, it would have worked either way: recently we talked about Pleasantville, a movie that takes a *strong* stance that I utterly disagree with, but it earned my admiration for the depth of its thinking anyhow.

The real question, I suppose, is *how* would Minority Report have broached the ethical questions of Pre-Crime more strongly? How could it have made a more demanding call on the audience to think about the issues? I honestly don't know. I'm not entirely sure it can be done in its storyline without sidetracking it, a greater crime. In the movie, Pre-Crime is essentially condemned on the basis of insider manipulation. But I think the more interesting question is whether or not Pre-Crime was dispensing ethical, just justice when there *wasn't* any occurrence of insider manipulation?

I think the natural human reaction is to say no -- whether that's because of a lack of trust in an impersonal process, perfect or no, or because of the simple observation that, with Pre-Crime, people are punished who have not committed any crimes at all -- never mind that the process establishes that they *will*.

Then we stem into a philosophical question about free will. Dave and I have gone the rounds on how free will and omniscience are mutually exclusive. I contend that they can co-exist -- that knowledge of a choice does not mean a lack of choice -- while Dave sort of parallels free will with chaos theory, i.e., that free will can only exist when there is uncertainty. If you take Dave's approach *and* believe in free will, then Pre-Crime doesn't work -- you could never be sure if the people being arrested for murder were truly those who were *going* to make the choice to commit the crime, or if they were all those people capable of it and faced with the decision.

I suppose Minority Report must be given at least a little credit for inspiring the thought in this post, but even so, the bulk of these moral questions are not addressed. The way Minority Report could have been more satisfying in its exploration of moral questions is, I think, for it to have introduced an event or anomaly or apparent inconsistency of some kind that *doesn't* have a clear-cut explanation like "insider corruption." Some plot point with equally severe but opposite consequences, depending on whether one believes in free will, or the co-existence of free will and omniscience, or acceptable error margins in the dispensation of justice, or some other revelant aspect of the larger question.

But how do you do that and still serve Minority Report's story, which *is* about insider corruption and *not* about any other sort of apparent inconsistency in the system? I have no idea how that could have been done, even with a reworked showdown with the villain.