Characters point out the painfully obvious – “Can you believe we used to stop this stuff before it happened?” Vega wonders with a thud in the opening scene – and use overly peppy one liners that are destined for an unwarranted laugh – “Peekaboo, bitch!” – resulting in a version of Minority Report that is nearly impossible to take seriously. Its tone is all over the place as well, never settling on grim future noir or cute buddy cop banter, and it doesn’t seem to have any real affection for these characters in the first place.
Dash gets the most screen time, and Sands is fine in the socially awkward psychic role, but the show seems to want us to think of him as the weird “other” without making him weird enough. As the source of chaos disrupting Vega’s status quo, he’s actually a pretty easy pill to swallow compared to similar shows like Sleepy Hollow or, well, Psych. The script’s grasp on his “powers” is also tenuous at best, with him simultaneously predicting the precise location of bird droppings but unable to pinpoint a mass murderer’s whereabouts in an abandoned building.
But it’s really Good who gets the short end of the stick here. She does what she can in a thankless role, but everything from her dialogue to her ridiculous outfits constantly belittle the fact that we’re supposed to take her seriously as a cop. She also gets the brunt of the show’s absolutely wonky-looking future tech, which strips the film’s tangible believability (Cruise used gloves in his Precrime investigations, can we remember?) down to something found in an episode of iCarly. The writers seem to pick and choose which tech they like (those gravity guns stick around) and then turn everything else into the 2065 version of an iPad, replacing a world that had character and edge with one that’s kind of just sterile, and one of the more bland visions of the future realized on TV in a while.
Overall, maybe the biggest problem with the show is that it completely negates the complex resolution of the movie. Cruise’s character John ends up dismantling the system he once believed in through a series of morally complex choices (free will vs. destiny, fate vs. fact, science vs. religion – the movie has no right answers but at least suggests a conclusion). Fox’s sequel series kind of dumps all over that in blatantly answering them. “Maybe John was wrong in the end, here’s a crime-solving Precog to prove it!” The show seems to say by the time the credits roll. It opens up old wounds left by the film but not in a emotionally satisfying way, and with a pilot that provides no tease of a grand overarching season mystery whatsoever, it hurts itself all the more for it in the end.
“Can you see?” Dash asks Vega while fighting bodily convulsions during a vision of the future, mirroring Agatha in the original. “See what?” she responds, the Tom Cruise surrogate. It’s at this point that Spielberg’s film halted the conversation, showing viewers snippets of its central mystery and letting them put the rest together. Fox’s Minority Report answers the question for you: “Murder.” As apt a metaphor as any, the show implants itself in Spielberg’s sandbox, full of conspiracies and jetpacks and anti-gravity cars, and then it dumps out all the sand.
