Dystopian Fiction Comparative Essay

Steven Spielberg’s questioning film “Minority Report”, a movie where crimes are stopped before they happen using pre-cogs by a special police unit, when John Andurton, the head chief, discovers he’s going to murder someone he’s never met, he sets out to find out why he was going to murder him and who he is “You don't have to run.” Ray Bradbury’s foreboding novel “Fahrenheit 451“ is a book where firemen burn books because they are outlawed but when a fireman starts breaking the law and starts reading books after he meets a special girl, Clarisse, he must hide and run from a government that hunts him down “So it was the hand that started it all . . . His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arms . . . His hands were ravenous”(42).. They are both works of dystopian fiction where controls are used to keep their inhabitants ignorant and “civilized”. However when it comes to contrasting the types of controls used, we can say “Minority Report” uses more technology to limit civilian’s everyday life by inserting machines to do their simple everyday tasks. Where as “Fahrenheit 451“ uses more government and surveillance like metal hounds to watch over them constantly.

In “Minority Report” the film has technology everywhere. They have technology in almost everything they touch and use. There’s so much technology humans are dumb-ed down over time and they start to rely on machines to do everything for them. Also in “Minority Report” humans have the free will to do what they like, where in “Fahrenheit 451“ they were limited in their actions. The two works of dystopian fiction are set in the future, but the movie is set much further into the future, with more advanced technology like cars that drive on walls, and future predicting machines, it also has advertisements everywhere promoting products and promoting the technology used to stop crimes.

“Fahrenheit 451“ has these human made metal machines that watch over human’s actions making sure they don’t “think”