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

[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. ^_^