Those a little older will probably remember Spielberg’s action sci-fi thriller “Minority Report”. In that futuristic dystopia from 2002, Tom Cruise was a detective who, in the distant year 2056, caught criminals even before they committed a crime thanks to advanced technology. But what a dystopia it would be if this futuristic technology didn’t get out of control and the unfortunate Tomo found himself in trouble when he realized that he should arrest himself since the seers predicted that he would commit a crime. In these slightly more than two decades, technology has advanced tremendously since the time of “Minority Report” and the premise, which was actually conceived by Philip K. Dick in the novel from 1956, no longer seems quite so impossible, and he used a very similar idea and creator of the eight-part “Class of ’09” series Tom Rob Smith.
The story in this dystopian thriller is set non-linearly and we follow the action through three time periods: in the past, i.e. 2009, the present, i.e. between 2023 and 2025, and the future, i.e. 2034. And in the beginning it was quite difficult to follow it and it seemed a bit confusing that constant jumping from one time to another, and all this time connecting the four main characters. Ashley Poet (Kate Mara), Tayo Michaels (Brian Tree Henry), Hour Nazari (Sepideh Moafi) and Daniel Lennix (Brian J. Smith) are all rookies at the FBI academy in the past, and we’ll see in the following timelines that they’re all they became more or less successful investigators.
Tayo even rose to the position of FBI Director, and their lives and careers will once again intertwine throughout these periods, especially when we realize that the FBI has decided to use artificial intelligence in the future to predict crimes and profile potential criminals. We will see through these eight episodes how and why something like this was put into practice in the first place and where it will lead, and although this series had incredibly big ambitions and wanted to capture a lot, it all remained rather vague and problematic. Partly due to the rather slow performance at the beginning and the fact that we need time at all to understand what is happening and the constant jumps through time.
All the same, “Class of ’09” brings a lot to think about and, among other things, problematizes the question of how something like this would affect the freedom of the residents. What would happen if such a system ended up in the hands of those who would want to abuse it, and as is usually the case, useful and potentially valuable technology will be completely misused due to humans and their evil and greedy intentions. We will see here what led to such a system being used in the first place, and the question of all questions is whether crimes and crime can be prevented at all?