I just rented and watched M.R and stumbled upon the same thing the others in the previous M.R-thread did, so I created this new thread to spare you the rereading of the old one.
The big timeline shift occurs when Anderton chooses not to kill Crow but instead arrests him.
We find out that his boss (Sydow) arranged it to take him out of the picture.
So how did the boss induce it?
The whole thing started with Agatha 'seeing' Anderton kill Crow. But in order for the ball to start rolling, the original Anderton in the vision must've had some prior, unique reason to find Crow other than just seeing himself in the vision.
Maybe if his boss had left an anonymous note, saying "go to this adress, you might find something" and thus led Anderton to the photos of Sean. But he didn't, so Agatha can't have spontaneously picked it up because Anderton had no reason to go!
In the old M.R-thread it was stated that the original short story explained this in clearer detail, that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Can anyone explain this again?
In the "Terminator"-paradox, the robots were created by a corporation that simply got good at it, thus it would've happened anyway. Then SkyNET sent a Terminator back in time, that would lose its arm and chip to the police, changing history so that Cyberdyne Sys invents SkyNET through inspiration by the arm and chip, instead of the original company.
Minority Report doesn't have this crucial "inevitability"-component, so does the book explain it better???
P.S: I'll tellya, this timeline-stough was tiring at first. It's so bubbly and cloy, and happy. But the more I think about it the more I begin to like it...
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
I haven't read Dick's story in a long time, but if I recall correctly it is sufficiently different from the movie as to be of little help in trying to understand fine details of the film's plot.