I’m just going to say up front that I was really disappointed in this movie. I’d really been looking forward to it, but I thought it was kind of an unbelievable mess.
I did not believe for a second that the wife of this brilliant scientist would be so overcome and blinded by love that she’d leave behind all rationality for TWO YEARS before it dawned on her that hey, maybe this is all a little weird and freaky and not quite right for humanity. I also am not entirely sure what I was supposed to get out of then very end of the film. But I look to the great minds of the Dope to maybe break it down for me.
My wife and I saw this movie this past Saturday. She wanted to see it because she likes Johnny Depp. I knew nothing about the movie other than the commercial for it, hadn’t read any reviews. So I went into it with no preconceived notions. I kind of enjoyed the movie, but my wife hated it and thought it was ridiculous. So afterward I looked it up on rotten tomatoes, and it appears most reviewers agree with her. Here’s a review by Andrew O’Hehir at Salon that trashes the movie pretty thoroughly and hilariously:
Here’s my take on the movie: yeah, much of the technology depicted was kinda silly (my joke to my wife when she picked the movie, before we saw it was “so we’re going to see a less funny remake of Max Headroom?”). But I thought the movie raised some interesting questions: one, what exactly is consciousness and self-awareness, and was the “Will Castor” computer simulation actually in any way comparable to the actual human or did it become something else altogether? The fact that the brain of the scientist played by Depp is transferred to computer is in the commercial, so I’ll spoiler-box the rest:
The movie was also very much a love story. His wife believed in what he was doing until toward the end. And he said at the end that he did it all for her, as the nanotechnology developed would clean the air, regrow forests, repair the biosphere, etc., the very things his wife had talked about in the conference where Depp’s character was shot afterward.
The ending was interesting- it seemed like it was leading to a condemnation of playing God with A.I., but the suggestion at the end was maybe it really would have been a good outcome for the world if compu-Depp’s vision would have been allowed to be accomplished. It is a very real thing that we are supplementing our bodies and minds with artificial components and at some point in the future we probably will self-evolve into something beyond a somewhat smart creature completely and exclusively made of meat.
Even though I enjoyed O’Hehir’s review, I’m not quite sure what version of the movie he watched, saying the compu-Depp was petulant and controlling. He did come off as creepy at times, but the movie was walking a line as to whether the real guy was still in there, or whether he was going to go full HAL9000. But in the end it was clear that compu-Depp, even though he may have gone too far with the Borg-like “autonomous but one mind” hybrid people thing, had good intentions. I think the fact that the movie didn’t go the HAL9000 “OMG, A.I. is eeeevil” route to be an interesting ending. Reminiscent of the Spielberg “A.I.”, another flawed but thought-provoking take on the matter. I thought much of AI was silly as well, especially the whole fairy tale subplot, but the idea of humans going extinct and being replaced by self-aware robots, non-organic beings, whatever you want to call them, was interesting.
Compu-depp won, and was still out there in every single water drop on the planet. The idea that knowledge of the source code from his great great great great x 27 ancestor program would create a virus that his self replicating nano-bots would be susceptible to is complete nonsense.
Compu-depp let the humans think they won because it was the way out with the least conflict, and because he didn’t need any of that facility or the quantum chips any more. He had transcended that when he created the self replicating nano-bots in the water and at the end he uploaded the consciousness of himself, his partner and all the the hybrids into distributed processing spread throughout all the nano bots in the water.
The huge giveaway for this is that AFTER the virus has supposedly spread and “killed” everything based on his code, we see a single drop of water fall on a sun flower in the casters garden and it springs to life again, obviously the work of surviving nano-bots. Then we see a strange shimmering in the water below the sunflower and the line about “everything being done to bring them together”. That was supposed to be telling you that both Casters are still alive and their consciousness was “running” in the nano bots in the pool of water underneath the sunflower, living in a virtual world.
If the reviewers missed this interpretation then I can understand why they’d trash it, as the obvious alternate interpretation is hollow and empty and completely unsatisfying.
Traffic caused me to be late for The Grand Budapest Hotel so the gf and I decided on this one after reading a quick synopsis. I hated the movie. I think that idea was excellent and not as far-fetched as one might think. But it took huge leaps of faith even if we accept that a being could quickly take over the control of the internet. I can’t see how that translates into controlling nature. The premise ends up being that the secret(s) to life are already out there somewhere on the internet, and that it just takes a super-intelligent omnipotent being to find, decipher or piece them together, and then use them to take over nature. It made me wonder why Depp’s virtual self didn’t do more to prevent his demise.
I liked it as well, and I agree with much of what you and Solost say, though I understood the ending to mean that the Caster’s did survive but only in the nanites that had (somehow) avoided the effects of the virus by being shielded in the garden. But I’m probably totally wrong on that.
I also don’t really understand why people had such a problem with the technology shown in the movie, granted its more advanced than what we currently have but not implausibly so.
Throughout the movie I kept wondering why the characters were completely freaking out when the AI/Caster hadn’t really done anything, granted the ‘upgraded’ people were pretty creepy but that’s the main thing.
So yep, enjoyed it, don’t get the hate. Which seems to be a common factor in my recent movie-watching experience.