Hello once another week! Get ready for yet another movie review with relor!
The movie I am commenting about today is Brainstorm.
Brainstorm is a science fiction flick in which a team of scientists develop the technology to record a person's experiences and play them back. Using this technology, it is possible to put a hat l¤oaded with sensors on a man's head, have him ride a roller coaster, and record his experience in a tape. Then, some other individual can strap another hat on, play the tape, and enjoy the
roller coaster as if he had been there.
Let me beging by telling that this movie is not exactly bad, but I feel it tried to do a bit too much and, as a result, didn't do any of then things it attempted to do very well.
The first half of the movie deals with the development of the technology itself. Specifically, Brainstorm tries us to make sure we understand the concept. We can see the team of scientists trying to sell the idea to their upper-ups in the firm and so on. While we are exposed to some interesting characters here, I cannot but feel like this part drags on too much. The film makes the point "This is how it works" and keeps demonstrating it for way longer than is warranted.
If you get past the initial tedium, things start getting interesting. As it turns out, the Military turn out to be behind the funding of the project, and intend to use it for nefarious purposes. While the trope is kind of stale at this point, the scientists trying to keep control of the whole thing while the Military try to take it away is actually quite ok as fictional conflict goes.
Something the film does right is exploring the possibilities of this technology. It pulls no punches. About the first thing they do is to record a man having sex so they can experience getting laid at any time by playing the tape. Educational aspects are mentioned, since this technology could be used to play college education in somebody's mind, for example. The Military are not so nice and would rather use the tapes for torture, brainwashing and other evil behavior.
This movie has been described elsewhere as a love story in disguise. I don't think it is an accurate, description, but I agree that, besides trying to be a science vs military flick and an intellectual exploration of the Brainstorm tech, it does try to be a love movie. The romantic drama is brought on by two of the scientists, who are going through an hostile splitup but are forced to keep working together in the project. Eventually, this drama is just an opportunity for the film to explore how a couple can fix their marriage issues by having each member playing the experiences of the other back and getting an understanding of their point of view.
The last part of the film brings forth the biggest of conflicts, which arises when one of the scientists realizes she is dying, and straps herself to the recording machine as she dies. The main character in the movie wants to play the tape personally, in order to experience what dying is like (for the science) while mostly everybody else wants to lock the tape out, because it is dangerous.
That is a lot of things going on, isn't it?
And this is the main problem I have with this movie. There is so much they try to make out of the concept that the end result feels to lack direction. This movie reminded me of a graduate stepping out of college and wondering what to do with all the great stuff he has on his head. If you have not been hiding under a stone lately, you'll be aware that the graduate, with all his intellectual might, is bound to end up delivering pizzas. Brainstorm is like that graduate, coming to us full of great ideas, turning out to be unable to put them to the best of uses, and eventually transforming into something cheaper than it should have been.
This is not to mean the movie sucks completely. For one, I love the retro tech. According to this film, in the future we will use tapes to record experiences and will be able to transfer them from here to there via modem. The mandatory hollywoodesque black-hat hackery is less cringeworthy than I was expecting. This means, it IS cringeworthy, but at does not make me want to search for the director and strangle him with the TVs power cord.
Brainstorm has the dubious honor of being Natalie Portman's last film. It was released posthumously.
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