Zed: I expect weird differences, as well...but I suspect
that the differences would be less than the jump from
1952 to 2002.

tom
-=W=-

Also, it seems that in the future cars are assembled fully fuelled and delivered to a highway on-ramp.

A comment by Jaron Lanier -- one of the futurists who worked on the film -- sums things up nicely:

"The pattern that emerged was that devices that were already antiquated in 2002 proved to be more photogenic than the perfected devices I suggested for 2050."

http://www.edge.org/documents/postcards/postcards_print.html

Yeah, the disks were goofy, as was the exhausting image movement interface, as was the inability 50 years hence to do a an automatic face match against a driver's license database... I could go on.

My biggest beef with plausibility in "Minority Report" is that all the high-tech was a future gloss applied to a society that's pretty indistinguishable from our own... there seem to be the same proportions of class divisions; people seem to work 40-hour weeks; commute in their cars; hang out at the mall... the lack of privacy, ubiquitousness of personalized marketing and police state don't seem to have much effect (other than eliminating murders around D.C.)

I expect to see some striking differences in 50 years' time that would seem totally weird today.

But it was all understandable, visually interesting, and supported the story.

The strengths, virtues and abilities of a movie are not the same as those of futurism. Get over it.

(This doesn't mean I'll argue for totally unforgiveable ignore-the-laws-of-physics stupid content, or for getting things wrong where getting things right would do no violence to telling the story... just that storytelling needs some slack.)

and you know, if he's watching those vids of his family every night at home for six years, doesn't it seem like he would have loaded them on his hard drive?

i mean, really, by 2054, does anyone imagine that computers and audio systems won't be completely integrated in most cases.

I'm glad I'm not the only one to notice that particularly silly system. And why do the disks have to be 1 foot x 1 foot?

And, more pressingly, why does the movie have to completely fall apart and turn into "Strange Days?"

Good point Bryant.

There's also the requirement for the system to be _understandable_ by the movie-going audiance.

It's also great fun to watch.

Mostly agreed, but note that the data transfer method is perfect when you need one of your systems protected by an air gap. I figure PreCrime is just very conscious that the only way to keep hackers off your machine is to avoid connecting it to anything.