Spielberg's film is adapted from Dick's 1956 novella, and the premise is taken whole: a Precrime division arrests people for murders they have not yet committed, on the word of three precognitives, and the officer who runs it is named by his own system. What the film keeps: the three precogs and the machinery of consensus, the minority report itself (the dissenting vision that proves the future is not fixed), and Anderton as both the believer in the system and its accused. What it changes, which is why this is filed MEDIUM rather than HIGH: Dick's Anderton is an ageing bureaucrat defending his agency against a successor, and the novella's ending has him accept the frame to keep Precrime alive. The film makes him young, grieving and pursued, and ends by dismantling it. The mechanism is Dick's, the arc is the film's.
