The precogs are back in the new series based on the film.
Dust off those ethics books because the official follow-up to Tom Cruise’s 2002 flick, Minority Report, picks up on many of the same themes of morals and justice as the original. And that’s not the only thing the incoming FOX TV series borrows from the original film.
For fans of the now 13-year-old project, there will be plenty of Easter eggs, including a familiar face in Daniel London’s “Wally the Caretaker” character and new fly-like contraptions resembling the film’s original spiders. The way the characters use the new technology in regards to breaking down culprits and the victims is visually similar too, as are the rooms in which they work.
For those who never quite caught onto the film, there’s enough exposition within the first few scenes to catch them up, too. Via a flashback to the year 2040 we meet the three children (or Precognitives) who eventually became the basis of the Precrime unit in Washington, where Cruise’s character worked. The opening quickly whips through the premise of the film before extending beyond, brining everyone to the year 2065—10 years following the end of the experiment.
The majority of the series is told through the eyes of Dash (Stark Sands), one of the twin Precogs who suddenly feels a moral obligation to help people he sees in peril, despite the warnings of his older sister, Agatha (now played by Laura Regan). Unfortunately, while he sees numbers and places, it’s his twin, Arthur (Nick Zano) who receives pertinent information like names. Of course, this wouldn’t be a FOX drama series without some sort of law enforcement involved, which is where Lara Vega (Meagan Good) comes in. Before long the three are working together to solve crimes, which may or may not include some of those souls who were captured as part of Precrime before the experiment went dark and the “criminals” were released.
Wilmer Valderrama factors into it all as fellow officer Will Blake, whose aspirations for a promotion create a professional rivalry of sorts for Vega. Given the setup it won’t take him long to figure out that she’s using some sort of top-secret resource to get ahead, at which point the secret of Dash will inevitably come out. But for now, it’s well hidden in the pilot.
Instead, plenty else is set up throughout the first hour to allow viewers to attach themselves to these characters. As a lead, Dash has many of the same drives that Cruise’s character did in the film, only he fails miserably. Whereas John Anderton would reach the potential victim with a second to spare, Dash proves to be seconds too late. It’s a refreshing quality in an action lead; every time he is called upon to perform some sort of physical task he’ll do it, but the sheer look of terror on his face proves he has no experience with this sort of thing whatsoever.
That will develop as the series goes on, but it’s a nice change of pace to have the hero not kick ass at every single task from the get-go. That’s one of the luxuries a television series offers in contrast to a film, where there is finite time to serve the plot. It also helps that the TV project is produced by Steven Spielberg, the film’s director; the continuity remains intact, even when the story veers off on another course.
It’s disappointing that Cruise doesn’t make an appearance in the pilot the way Bradley Cooper does in Limitless, another film-turned-TV-series debuting this season. But that also serves as a positive because it helps set this project apart from the film. The real potential negative is threefold: has too much time has passed since the hype of the movie for this to really take off, is the overall concept a little too niche for a network series, and can Minority Report maintain the hyper pace it sets forth for itself in the pilot? The jury is still out on the first two, but given that much of the pilot had to be reshot once (Sands was originally going to invoke his own Tatiana Maslany and play both twins), the show won’t have the luxury of time on its side in future episodes.
Buy hey—then again, time isn’t exactly something the characters on the show have the luxury of here either.
The TV follow-up to the 2002 film starring Tom Cruise is a thrilling debut with interesting new characters who sometimes break the traditional crime-solving TV mould. It plays on the same themes and uses the same technologies as the film, with several adaptations and tweaks that make it feel just a little farther in the future (a decade, to be exact). It’s a fast-paced, high-concept idea that may be hard to maintain for a network audience, but one thing the series certainly does is set itself apart from the movie while honoring it.
Minority Report debuts Monday, September 21st at 9:00pm ET/PT on FOX.
