I wish people would pay more attention to what motivated Schrödinger's analogy (describing the absurdity of the contemporary theory on quantum mechanics).
Okay, I can accept that the characters are not savvy enough to talk knowledgeably about quantum mechanics, and the audience is equally ill-equipped to understand actual quantum mechanics... but, it seems the filmmakers themselves are ill-equipped to use anything but bad popular metaphysics. It's all just a pile of pseudoscience nonsense. Throwing "quantum" into a script doesn't make it science fiction. That's just the woo-ification of the word. Promoting the story as science fiction does no service to the audience or to science.
But let's talk about the characters: why all the fear, paranoia, and hostility? Myself and people I know would have been filled with curiosity and wonder, had we been in the position of the film's characters. Are we supposed to believe that these characters are representative of average people, such as those of us in the audience? If so, it feels false, at best, and insulting at worst.
Scripted hostility and paranoia tends to feel false to me in many films and shows, but it's even worse here. I think that the method of filmmaking used (notes and improv, rather than scripts) is exactly the cause: Instead of giving actors a well-drawn scripted story, with sensible character motivations, a room full of improv actors was forced to come up with their own interpretations based on a few daily notes given them by the director. It's no wonder that the notion of a room full of friends feels like a room full of isolated, disparate microcosms.
The budgetary constraints are probably the major driver behind the contrived character behaviors: we can't have people engage in curiosity, because then the director would have to film the results. Instead, they're instructed to be fearful, so the director can keep the visuals simple and eliminate the need for extensive difficult in-camera tricks or expensive visual effects.
I want to appreciate the effort and ideas tried in this film, but the end result left me irritated by the pseudoscience and the character behavior. This was not entertainment. It was an exercise in forcing myself to sit through something actively annoying. I could not identify with these paranoid and irrational characters. I would not have willingly spent an evening with these people in real life; watching them on screen for 88 minutes was more than enough. Was the filmmaker's goal to annoy the audience?
There's no objective measure or accounting for taste, but seeing this film treated to praise such as "cerebral" (when that's not an insult, because anti-intellectualism) and "intelligent" just annoys me. It reminds me just how credulous and uncritical audiences are. In fact, there's a sad irony here: the characters, with their credulous consumption and regurgitation of bad pop science articles and woo are misinterpreted as "intelligent and aware" by an audience composed of exactly the same type of people.
Okay, I can accept that the characters are not savvy enough to talk knowledgeably about quantum mechanics, and the audience is equally ill-equipped to understand actual quantum mechanics... but, it seems the filmmakers themselves are ill-equipped to use anything but bad popular metaphysics. It's all just a pile of pseudoscience nonsense. Throwing "quantum" into a script doesn't make it science fiction. That's just the woo-ification of the word. Promoting the story as science fiction does no service to the audience or to science.
But let's talk about the characters: why all the fear, paranoia, and hostility? Myself and people I know would have been filled with curiosity and wonder, had we been in the position of the film's characters. Are we supposed to believe that these characters are representative of average people, such as those of us in the audience? If so, it feels false, at best, and insulting at worst.
Scripted hostility and paranoia tends to feel false to me in many films and shows, but it's even worse here. I think that the method of filmmaking used (notes and improv, rather than scripts) is exactly the cause: Instead of giving actors a well-drawn scripted story, with sensible character motivations, a room full of improv actors was forced to come up with their own interpretations based on a few daily notes given them by the director. It's no wonder that the notion of a room full of friends feels like a room full of isolated, disparate microcosms.
The budgetary constraints are probably the major driver behind the contrived character behaviors: we can't have people engage in curiosity, because then the director would have to film the results. Instead, they're instructed to be fearful, so the director can keep the visuals simple and eliminate the need for extensive difficult in-camera tricks or expensive visual effects.
I want to appreciate the effort and ideas tried in this film, but the end result left me irritated by the pseudoscience and the character behavior. This was not entertainment. It was an exercise in forcing myself to sit through something actively annoying. I could not identify with these paranoid and irrational characters. I would not have willingly spent an evening with these people in real life; watching them on screen for 88 minutes was more than enough. Was the filmmaker's goal to annoy the audience?
There's no objective measure or accounting for taste, but seeing this film treated to praise such as "cerebral" (when that's not an insult, because anti-intellectualism) and "intelligent" just annoys me. It reminds me just how credulous and uncritical audiences are. In fact, there's a sad irony here: the characters, with their credulous consumption and regurgitation of bad pop science articles and woo are misinterpreted as "intelligent and aware" by an audience composed of exactly the same type of people.
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