Or does the actual intent have to be there? It's been years since I watched this and I forget. Like would you get arrested if you fantasized about killing your boss but had no actual intent to do so?
sharePre-cog see the future, so the person is not just thinking about killing but they will actually go out and do it.
shareNot the case, though.
The whole premise of the movie is that what the precogs see, ALWAYS happens. But, When Agatha is removed by Tom Cruise, and they escape and eventually, they find his son's killer and Tom Cruise has a gun which he intends to use to shoot the guy (also predicted by the precogs), Agatha reminds him that he has a choice (to not kill the man, but in that scene, Cruise accidentally kills him).
But, that premise of "infallible prediction" proves to not be so infallible by the end of the movie, since Tom Cruise does not kill his former boss (as predicted by the two remaining precogs). This is why they disassemble that agency at the end. That's the whole point of The Minority Report: that everyone has free will, and predicting what they MIGHT do is not the actual reality that might/might not happen.
They see the future and events that happen even without thinking about them... and the feed can sometimes be misinterpreted... like when they thought that a person wearing sunglasses was inside the room where Anderton shoots Leo Crowe... but it was actually just a billboard outside.
shareYup, I think everyone else explained it well, but I will explain it in my own words. The precogs didn’t see the future at 100% accuracy. With murder they were able to see a probable outcome, but there was always free will in place. John showed this when he didn’t kill the guy he was set up to kill. Director Lamar also shows this to be true when he shot himself.
Because of the element of free will, the precog program was deemed a failure; and because those imprisoned never committed a crime, it was dismantled and those imprisoned were released (under a ‘parole-like’ status).
As a straight answer to your question, no, intent was not needed. I imagine this was baked into their sentencing calculations (remember prisoners were sent to ‘paradise’ and they we saw a character or two who had been finished his sentence). Even so, there is a big difference between negligent manslaughter and 1st degree homicide. I was surprised to have missed the part (or maybe I didn’t?) when the discuss the differences and how that works within the precog system.
Anyway, I still thought is was a fun flick!