Thursday, December 29, 2022

Minority Report (2002)


The picture above is a detail from the final scene/shot of Spielberg's 2002 film version of Philip K. Dick's short story "Minority Report" (1956), which I began watching (for the second time) last night with the exhilaration the comes with forgetting what happens at the end.

The woman pictured is Agatha (Samantha Morton), a "Precog" who, with male twins, was the product of a genetic experiment on the children of drug addicts. Though many of these children died, Agatha and the twins survived to become empathetic instruments in a localized Precrime test project that had, over the past six years, eliminated murders in the Washington, DC area.

In this final scene we see the three liberated Precogs living in a farmhouse amongst a series of small near-Arctic islands. As to where exactly these islands are, a clue lies on the spine of an upside-down book. The spine reads: "Distant Country", with the name "Scott" at what would be its bottom end.

A google search shows nothing but a quote from Sir Walter Scott: "... a distant country from which I now live." Pushing on, I discover this: The Distant and Unsurveyed Country: a Woman's Winter at Baffin Island, 1857-1858 (1997-2014) by William Gillies Ross. Yes, that's where these Precogs could be living -- on Baffin Island.

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