A Day Out at the Home Theater

[tuftears]

kagetsume was in the area, and there were no great movies out this weekend, so... We took a trip up to boingdragon's place and spent the day watching movies with subtitles!

We saw Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Source Code, and The Warrior's Way. Narnia was pretty yet predictable, but we didn't know what to expect for the other two movies, they looked interesting and we'd heard good reviews of them.

I must say, Source Code was awesome but I'm grateful that we didn't catch it in theaters, I would never have followed the plotline without the subtitles. It was very intelligent, and even without using a lot of gratuitous special effects or computer animations, it was very much a thinking science fiction movie.

No actual programming or "hacking" is involved, so the name is fairly misleading. The protagonist wakes up on a train; he is being addressed as 'Sean' by his traveling companion, though he's sure that's not his name. Who is he and what is he doing there? This is unriddled over the course of the movie.

The Warrior's Way is more a shiny Hong Kong-style martial arts/cowboys crossover movie, but it was presented with a lot of style and poking fun/paying homage to the cliches and archetypes of the milieu. We enjoyed it, but it was more engaging in the creative and visual sense, where Source Code was more engaging intellectually and emotionally.

Interesting to see two very different movies essentially back to back!

It was a great day out, thanks kagetsume and boingdragon!

Comments

[zrath.livejournal.com]

Source Code was directed by Duncan Jones, whose first film was "Moon" with Sam Rockwell, which is a neat old school sci-fi movie with an Outland/Alien design aesthetic. I highly recommend it.
Duncan Jones is the son of David Bowie. :)

[caffeinewabbit.livejournal.com]

Source Code was great. One of the first mainstream sci-fi movies I've seen in a long while that was actually based on ideas and not dumbed-down to idiocy.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Need more like that!

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

We saw "Source Code" over at Digital_Rampage's place. He seems to get all the sci-fi/fantasy/action movies (good or bad), either via NetFlix or buying the things when they come out on DVD. I'd put this one in the "good" category, definitely.

It definitely inspired a bit of brooding over the implications afterward.

Spoilerbox!

The implication seemed to be that in each of these "alternate timelines," time kept marching forward even though the protagonist died in each one. In the main world - well, who cares? It's not an alternate timeline we can interact with and live in, so it's not "real," and feel free to do whatever crazy stuff you want, in order to see what happens. It prompts me to think about the unseen consequences of lots of time travel fiction, especially if the plot centers on some person going back in time to change the past, to fix the unhappy present. What happens to the observer in the present timeline who DOES NOT hop into the time machine? Does that timeline simply cease to exist? Or is there another timeline that marches forward, in which the time traveler just ceased to exist? (The recent anime "Stein's Gate" kind of hinted at that, but didn't really explore it beyond a brief wondering by one of those alternate-timeline persons who was being left behind.) The "happy ending" is a bit creepy, I suppose, but still neat in its own way. I can't help but wonder, though: what about the guy whose body was effectively hijacked? I guess he's effectively "erased" by the process.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

That was my take as well. Ironically you could do this in Avatars 2.0, with a big Weird Science roll.

The protagonist is the 'observer-soul'. He's being injected into a virtual reality composed of the short-term memory in the human brain, which is essentially embedded into a Q-Core framework. His observation of the VR is what creates the universe-- the universe what we perceive. (this process is called, in the Avatars 2.0 physics magazines, "Antonomasia")

Every time he returns from an excursion, the micro-universe essentially collapses because it is no longer being observed. He had to be killed in the 'real world'-- his consciousness permanently placed into the 'Source Code'-- to keep it in existence.

But, you ask, what about the other people who were in the train? Aren't they observers? Yes, but it's similar to the principle of virtual particles, matter and antimatter pairs that constantly form, mutually annihilate, then fade, thus creating 'zero point energy'. They're echoes cast by his own presence. Over time, they may stabilize and become real.

Or something like that! Handwaving the science. ^_^