Only Person In The Movie example essay topic

There are aspects of a story that a movie is better suited to convey than a book, and vice versa. In movies we are able to see lush images without having to construct them ourselves, the characters and setting are there for us to observe without having to imagine anything. Movies utilize quick cuts between scenes and segments, and camera angles and shots that further depict the emotion of a scene. A chase scene in a book will rarely match one in a movie because of the visual nature of a chase. When reading we have to take another step between the words and the processing of their meaning to construct an image of the action taking place. Film eliminates this extra step, at the same time we experience the story, we see it.

In a novel, the time we have to our imagination is also the time we have to reflect on the action, so that novels are the more interactive of the two media, creating a synthesis between the two worlds of author and reader, whereas a filmmaker is simply presenting you with his side, with no time to create your own. In science fiction, film may be the more palatable medium, as the ideas of the author are able to be presented more fully, without the audience's lingering notion of the world as we know it. In movies, futuristic worlds are pierced more quickly to their essences, as opposed to having to describe an almost completely different world in words. When watching Minority Report we see only faint traces of our world, namely in the homes of the minor characters.

In Androids, the world is also supplanted by one that is alien to us, but more difficult to understand on its own terms, constructed as it is by a series of words on a page. Because of this, novels seem the more likely of the two media to truly have an effect on our perception of the present world in relation to a possible world, because the images we invent for the story are more firmly based in the world that we see. I haven't read the short story Minority Report is based on, but I doubt that my imagination would have reached as far as Spielberg's in its well-crafted depiction of the future. In a book, the futuristic concepts introduced remain only concepts, without real counterparts. In the movie we see the vast leaps in technology (the eye-scans, the computer system at Precrime) and thus consider their implications without the significance we would if we constructed them ourselves from the author's description. In both movies, technological advancement has caused a small sect of people or near-people to be treated as nonhuman.

In Androids both androids and specials are less than regular people; in Minority Report the pre-cogs are treated simultaneously as deities and slaves. By the end of both movies the attitudes of the main characters have changed to allow some wavering to the thoughtlessness with which they " ve treated the others. By the end of Androids, Deckard is thinking more critically about androids and what a small difference there is between them and humans. He considers the three distinct statuses and relationships between humans, and ys, and specials and this makes their distinctions more unclear.

He is hardly able to resist having sex with an android, even considering its legal and ethical implications, without regard to the fact that he's married. Androids makes a big point of empathy existing only within the human community, yet humans have lost so much of their alleged empathy that throughout much of the novel I suspected even Deckard of being an andy. The year empathy boxes appear on Earth, Mercer tells them that they shall kill "only the killers"; a Mercerite senses evil without understanding it; a Mercerite is free to locate the nebulous presence of The Killers wherever he sees fit. (32) Dick writes, "For Rick Deckard an escaped humanoid robot, which had killed its master, which had been equipped with an intelligence greater than that of many human beings, which had no regard for animals, which possessed no ability to feel empathic joy for another life form's success or grief at its defeat-that, for him, epitomized the Killers". (32) In this same section of the book it states that "it was never clear who or what this evil presence was". Thus, by the end of the novel, when Mercerism is declared hogwash and Deckard has had compunctions about the nature of his work it feels as though he has been unjustified in his actions, and could quite possibly be classified as one of 'The Killers' himself.

In Minority Report, the lives of the innocent pre-cogs as well as that of Agatha's mother, Ann Lively, are compromised in order for Precrime to exist. The people who run Precrime don't think of them as people, their title alone, the pre-cognitive's, make them sound like nothing more than pieces of technology. There is a sculpture outside the Precrime building that is a representation of the three pre-cogs, but its abstract quality blurs the fact that they are people, it is more like one entity with three torsos and three heads, but still connected by one body. When Anderton is in the Temple and Agatha lunges at him from the pool, Wally, her caretaker and technician, claims that it couldn't have happened, that it's "impossible", that the pre-cogs can't even see the real world. Pre-cogs have been stripped of human qualities and on the rare occasion that they might display them, they are ignored, or swept under the rug as an aberration. The only person in the movie who doesn't retain a full-fledged, blind belief in Precrime is Wither, vilified for much of the movie and killed at the same moment that he is redeemed.

While not the protagonist of the movie, he is still the good guy. He is skeptical of the shaky technology under which Washington is handling its capital crimes and, working for the Attorney General, is ostensibly protecting the interests of the people. He does not have a past which Precrime would have altered, nor an agenda to eliminate crime through sacrifice, his only aim is only to investigate the methods of the department. He is the only one to realize the existence of a human element that technology can never surmount, partly because we are the purveyors of that technology, and partly because the technology is based on humans, which are always flawed.

For Dick, demise is the direction in which technology leads. If not the loss of love, trust, fidelity, or empathy, at least the technology itself will cease to exist. In both works we " ve considered there is a noticeable lack of love, of genuine, mutual human affection and admiration which has an effect on how each of the characters react to their worlds. In Androids there is the Penfield mood organ which serves Deckard and Iran in the same way that drugs serve us today; Isidore has his empathy box, which he seems to value more than anything else. In Minority Report Anderton seems to be mildly addicted to a substance unknown to us.

The friend who built his computer system, Rufus Riley, runs a business where computers can make even the most twisted fantasies a reality. Deckard's relationship with his wife has a strain that seems caused more by indifference than by animosity; Anderton's relationship with his wife was severed by the loss of their son. Deckard has to deal with the moral ambiguity of adultery with an android; Anderton is able to deaden his pain by taking drugs and watching pre-recorded holograms of his family during happier times. In all these instances there is the feeling that instead of replacing the missing parts of their lives with a healthier human element, the characters turn to technology to assuage their troubles and, in the end, are left with nothing. Technology is casting a shadow over the things in their lives that are more important, love and human contact, and the increase in technology is making it increasingly more difficult for the characters to return to their base desires, to be loved. Only when the technological advancements are challenged are the characters able to adjust their perspectives and see, once again, what is most important in their short lives.

Only when Precrime has been abolished is Anderton reconciled with his wife; only when the androids have been retired and Mercerism exposed is Deckard able to focus and return to his. This is also linked to Dick's anti-drug stance. The existence of the pre-cogs, which is ultimately condemned, has its origin in drug use. Anderton's line of work, inextricably tied to great advances in technology, and his incessant drug use are the only things that allow him to continue in the wake of his son's disappearance. Iran constructs her day around the Penfield mood organ, which has an attritional effect on their relationship, taking it out of a human context and into the sterile intricacies of a machine. Dick wants us to deal with the world as it comes to us, without empathy boxes and mood organs, without visions of the future which we are able to alter.

For him it is essential that every human remain human and elicit the respect of other humans in order, not necessarily to survive, but to live a life in which our experiences are entirely our own. The Oxford English Dictionary defines utopia as 'a good place' or 'a no place'. The Washington, DC of Minority Report fits the definition in that it was a wonderful place to be, but it could never actually exist, at least not in the flawless way that most people saw it. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? has a more realistic outlook on the world it portrays, though, while wholeheartedly dystopian, there is a sense of hope at the end of the book that the beginning doesn't have. I agree with Eric P. Nash of The New York Times who, on the cover of our edition, calls Dick "a prophet". The writer paints an entirely convincing portrait of what our world could be like with such advancements in technology, at the same time warning us about the possible effects of our reliance on these advancements.