Hacker Cinema
Mindfield
1989 · Film · 92 min
Directed by Jean-Claude Lord
In the long shadow of an experimental CIA mind control program, Sergeant Kellen O'Reilly begins experiencing violent flashbacks of his “treatments” at the hands of the sinister Dr. Satorius. When the body count on his latest case inexplicably begins pointing toward his own fragmented past, a romance with Satorius’ criminal prosecutor raises the stakes. O'Reilly must forge a path forward through a hall-of-mirrors conspiracy stretching from the Mafia to the highest levels of the CIA, culminating in a shocking, stadium-sized confrontation.
1 positive1 negative1 mixed1 neutralfrom 4 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
4 comments on Hacker News
I loved bday eve, but really didn’t enjoy mindfield. Michael often felt like he was working under duress, and the episodes had a very “produced” feel to them.
Honestly, I'm not all that surprised, but I do think that YouTube didn't do a very good job at selling YouTube Originals.
They didn't do what every other platform did initially: Fill it with content to draw people in. It's certainly difficult to do in the modern era of hyper fragmented content platforms, but YouTube is still a centerpiece of modern content delivery. Without that content, all they could offer was their actual original content. Yes, the YouTube Movies channel exists, but that's not a wide selection.
I don't think that's necessarily all YouTube's fault. The siloing of content is a significant problem, and this failure likely represents real problems for the future of streaming for customers.
Of the Originals content, Cobra Kai was the only good show I recall from it, and they sold that to Netflix. The only other Original I can think of is MindField, which was a good enough show, but I kept bouncing off of it. It didn't really seem interested in answering the questions it posed.
What about the premium series they produced, Mindfield? A good number of the episodes are about Michael Stevens (Vsauce) taking hallucinogens and describing the experience.
On second thought, I guess most of those aren't addictive. It still seems like a really odd line to draw.
Mindfield, the new series by vsauce, tackled this in its first episode, which recently became free to watch.
It was an interesting watch, although I couldn't really take the experiment seriously after the segment with the former inmate who had spent way more time confined in a cell with even less stimulation than the one Michael was about to enter.
Anyhow, prolonged isolation(>3 days, maybe less) and willful disruption of circadian rhythms should definitely be considered torture.
Also, doing this to people who will reenter society is just so shortsighted and dumb, regardless of the total lack of morality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqKdEhx-dD4