Hacker Cinema
The Prestige
2006 · Film · 131 min
Directed by Christopher Nolan
A mysterious story of two magicians whose intense rivalry leads them on a life-long battle for supremacy -- full of obsession, deceit and jealousy with dangerous and deadly consequences.
31 positive2 negative1 mixed29 neutralfrom 63 commenters
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68 comments on Hacker News
I believe that The Dark Knight Rises is pretty close to a bad movie. It does have qualities but it barely makes the cut. The rest varies a lot but outside of the more grounded ones (Prestige, Insomnia and The Dark Knight), I find most of their stories and characters very artificial and cardboard. Odyssey is very sanitized but it works very well because the characters and events are by definition representations of ideas.
Still, his movies try to be stimulating even if they don't land, and they all have great moments filmed in ways you've never seen before and that's good enough for me.
When I was a kid I loved Inception. As an adult I prefer Prestige.
I wish he would go back to his older philosophy of movie making but he never made a bad movie I Think
"""I have an idea for a movie club, where two movies with a tenuously connected theme are watched (separately) and then discussed. If you've seen the movies "XXX", and "YYY", tell me what is similar about them, what's different, what are some possible "connected themes" and who tackled the topic better?"""
...time passes...
"""Now that you understand the idea behind these pairings, recommend five more pairings, but don't give any hints as to their connections, just five bullet points with "A vs B" movie titles. Bonus points if there is at least a 10-year gap between them, and they are both not box-office blockbusters (but make sure they are slightly more popular or recognizable movies, not exclusively low-distribution non-critically-acclaimed indie movies)."""
* Children of Men vs Snowpiercer * Lost in Translation vs Frances Ha * No Country for Old Men vs Hell or High Water * The Prestige vs The Illusionist * Drive vs Nightcrawler
...I know guidance is "don't just post AI output", but this is specifically a human-to-human discussion around novel(?) ways to interact with AI/LLM's. I've found they're _really_ good at conceptual-venn-diagrams.
There's a book "Algorithms to Live By" (ie: look for matching socks via BFS/DFS or whatever). Asking the AI: "you know a bunch of algorithms, what are the top three that should have been in the book?" => "what are the weakest that could have been removed?"
Recently during performance reviews, we had to write our self-assessment and had guidance from on high like: "make sure you talk about people skills, technical skills, customer impact, etc." ...so yada yada: "I'm so amazing, I'm so great" => "Dear AI, I've been given this guidance `...`, please compare my handcrafted storytelling against the guidance `...` and tell me where I have missed covering a requirement" => "...now please give help w.r.t. simplifying or cleaning up the section on $INCREDIBLE_TECHNICAL_ACHIEVEMENT b/c I was focusing on describing my personal impact, but need help making it more digestible for others".
The combination of instant, tailored feedback and the fact that they've read the whole internet, "watched" every movie (read the script, read critics reviews, reddit, forum discussions, etc), read most published books, and that they're 80%+ plumbers, doctors, lawyers, car mechanics, etc. make them an unstoppable research assistant, especially when crossing connections that would normally be "expensive" to do so.
Example: ask a [doctor+lawyer+plumber] about the health and legal impacts of lead solder in pipes or whatever. Instead of needing to schedule 3 people's times, wait for them, pay them, etc, you can get instant "free" feedback, educate yourself, and then have a more solid foundation to branch out from there. Such incredibly useful tools!
It’s starting to sound like the plot of The Prestige (2006 Christopher Nolan film)
You're correct about the TV special with the truck. I don't agree that magic doesn't work on TV. Regardless of whether it's a TV show or performed in front of me the nature of magic† (as a performance) is that the performer gets to decide what to show and obviously they aren't going to leave only a single possibility open to explain what I saw, that's something Penn has talked about - there's only one way to do that trick in The Prestige so you would never do that trick.
I've never seen Penn & Teller live, but I have seen Derren Brown both on TV and in person. Now, on TV one of the things which most impresses me is Derren's use of forces. There are a handful that even an amateur who knows what they're looking for can see in some of the TV shows and there are more places where it's obviously a force but I can't figure out how it's done. In person though, that experience is actually less fun, because of course the force doesn't work on me. So he's forced a theatre full of other people to do what he wanted, and they don't know how. It didn't work on me in the TV audience but that's fine, I'm not the target - when it doesn't work in a theatre full of people it's a bit disappointing. When I listened to a recording of "Thou shalt always kill" I knew from the outset what the last two lines would be but that still kinda works, again in person it wouldn't land the same.
† If you claim not to be a magician, that this is real, then it's not up to you what is shown or not shown, if Millikan's drop experiment only worked with this custom made box and a specified oil recipe then it's just a trick. We do the experiment in whatever circumstances are available and it works because it's measuring a fact about our universe, it's not a trick.
Recently I encountered a piece discussing "The Prestige" as a counter to the opinion that science dulls the wonder of the world by removing magic from the equation.
The idea is that the machine in The Prestige is stipulated as being science as a conceit to allow the audience to experience an unexplainable phenomenon as the people of the time of the film would have experienced to technology of today.
The distinction between magic and technology is shown to be that the wonder goes away for magic tricks once you know how the trick is performed. Technology maintains wonder even after you know how it works, because the wonder is the appreciation of how the goal is achieved by known principles.
The theory doesn't make any sense; unlike The Sixth Sense, the main character in Interstellar interacts with a lot of people. If he's dead, so are they (or they're just figments of his post-death experience).
The journey doesn't make any sense as a post-death experience, since none of the events are tied to his life (before the events of the movie), so there's no deeper meaning to the wave planet, or the ice planet, or falling into the black hole.
Also, Nolan doesn't do meta-contextual films. His specialty is the technical aspects of storytelling (see, e.g., Memento, The Prestige, Dunkirk, and Tenet), not in imbuing deeper emotional meanings into his works. Indeed, one of the big critiques of his films (excluding Dunkirk and Oppenheimer) was that they generally lack any emotional depth.
Yes, Nolan improves on that in later movies but he used to abuse of it.
Another movie of him that crimes of this non stop is The Prestige.
The possibilities for every body else. The cost for you.
From your point of view, you step into a machine, and then you randomly experience one of the interactions with a user. If the image truly lives forever, you have overwhelming chance of interacting with somebody completely alien to you, who will ask you things you don't fully understand, and marvel at your primitiveness. Then you die.
You have some small chance of living for a few years with a user you understand. Probably still much shorter, less rewarding, less free than if (by chance) you are the version of yourself that steps out of the scanner and lives their natural, physical life instead.
It's a Prestige situation [1] except you have been tricked into it, because the image does not get used according to the terms you signed.
"There'll be people just like me forever" is very different from "I live forever", to me.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prestige_(film)
I don't think that conclusion tells the whole story. If you take a great movie with a very famous twist in in it, they are not good because of the secret/twist, but the secret/twist definitely has greater power if you don't know it beforehand.
For example, there are some movies like The Prestige, The Crying game and The Usual Suspects there is a set up and when the twist happens, you look back and realise the movie was hinting at it at various points but you didn't expect it. If you knew, you would see the hints much more easily and the look back would not be as fun. This sort of has the same impact as a magic trick. It's fun to be fooled.
Some other movies like Se7en, Chinatown and "Easy Rider" I would call "bolt from the blue" where the impact is mostly like being punched in the guts. It's not fun but again if you are not emotionally prepared by knowing what will happen it is much more powerful.
I wouldn't say any of those had a flimsy story. In in all cases the enjoyment comes from the writing, direction, performances etc all being of a very high standard, not just from the twist. The twist really adds something though.
I don't necessarily disagree with this as a rule of thumb, but I thought it would be fun to come up with a few counter-examples. Most of these I would consider "artsy-fartsy" or "artsy-fartsy lite" movies that are popular with audiences but less so with critics.
Lost Highway (1997) - 68% Tomatometer - 87% Audience Score
Fight Club (1999) - 79% Tomatometer - 96% Audience Score
American Psycho (2000) - 68% Tomatometer - 85% Audience Score
Requiem for a Dream (2000) - 78% Tomatometer - 93% Audience Score
Dancer in the Dark (2000) - 69% Tomatometer - 91% Audience Score
Oldboy (2003) - 82% Tomatometer - 94% Audience Score
The Prestige (2006) - 77% Tomatometer - 92% Audience Score
Joker (2019) - 69% Tomatometer - 88% Audience Score
Yeah, I'm generally not an early adopter of technology -- I would probably let a few million people try it out before I put my own body in it. The Prestige is excellent. Christopher Nolan has a talent for taking a philosophical concept and turning it into a great action/thriller movie.
I was watching yesterday the 2006 movie "The prestige", with incredibly atmospheric locales that feel so alien. And yet, that world is but one hundred years away. It wasn't until 1934 that the Public Utility Holding Company Act recognized electricity as a utility.
Less than one hundred years after that, we have managed to juice out a general digital intellect from humanity's joint efforts. Let's see if we survive the next one hundred years, but boy, way to go!
Also worth checking out the 2006 Christopher Nolan film The Prestige if you’ve never seen it.
Have you not seen the documentary "Prestige"?!
/s
These are all generally highly reviewed can lead to interesting discussions:
Gattaca - interesting take on genetics/DNA discrimination
Europa - hard science fiction, maybe a bit slow for a 12 year old
The Net - older movie but the concept of digital exile resonates today
City of Ember - post apocalyptic civilization that lives deep underground
First Man - dramatization of Neil Armstrong and the first moon landing (not realy "fiction")
Arrival - first contact situation, tastefully done
Contact - another first contact situation that explores how politics, skepticism, and fanaticism react
The Martian - easily as fun as the book
The Prestige - competing magicians in an industrial age setting
The Hunger Games - extreme class divide in a future setting
Jurassic Park - the original not the sequels
Stargate - wormhole travel to another planet (be careful with the TV shows though, SG1 on streaming has full frontal nudity and "not ok" scenes which were obviously not on the broadcast version and a total shock when we watched it as a family)
District 9 - has some graphic gore and language, so it might be 14+, but is an interesting look at aliens as refugees
Contagion - a look at how a pandemic could play out. Premiered before COVID.
The Maze Runner - interesting setting and look at group dynamics
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids - fun setting
The Village - scary movie with a sci fi twist
Galaxy Quest - comedy
Short Circuit - old movie that deals with AI sentience
Innerspace - another old one, but has some fun concepts
Maybe you're just totally misguided on what a producer does, which may be the joke you're trying to make that nobody knows what a producer does. The producer would be closer to the president of the board while the director would be the CEO.
This is false. It seems you don't know what you're talking about. OTOH, I have worked with multiple studios including Fox (now 20th Century), Searchlight, Vendome, Canal+, and Lightstorm.
The executive producer is similar to the CEO or other executive; hence the "executive" in their title. They are in charge of the overall production, but not the creative aspects of the film or episode, and usually are not involved in the day-to-day operations. A regular "producer" can be anyone involved with the day-to-day operations of this production, and this title was once given out like candy. (Look at the credits for Top Gun: Maverick, for example: David Ellison is credited with a "producer" title despite having no actual involvement with the movie beyond being the CEO of one of the studios funding the production.)
The director is not involved with hiring crew, unless they also act as a producer (aka, the "auteur" school). These days, many directors also executive produce their own films (e.g., Nolan, Cameron, etc.), but many don't (e.g., almost all Disney movies). The director gets to provide input as to who gets hired, but quite frequently the main crew and cast will already be attached to the film. Notably, directors can and do leave films all the time (e.g., Rogue One, Justice League).
Who the creator/founder equivalent is really differs between projects. Sometimes, the producer has the idea and staffs around it. Sometimes, the director has the idea and also acts as a producer or just staffs the producer out to someone. Sometimes, it's the studio's idea and staffs everything out.
This is true for a few films, but the vast majority of films start with a screenplay that has come across the producer's desk. Auteur directors might produce their own ideas (e.g., Lucas, Shamalayan, Nolan, Cameron), but even they will usually start with an idea they acquired from someone else (Shamalayan: Old and Cabin at the End of the World, Gunn: Guardians of the Galaxy, Nolan: Insomnia, The Prestige, Batman Begins, Spielberg: almost all of his films, etc. Look at IMDB to see the production credits they have far exceed the films they actually direct).
I asked ChatGPT. It gave me bunch. I got some I've never heard of. I think I'll look into them.
<ChatGPT>
list 50 interesting movies that explore AI.
The Matrix
Ex Machina
Blade Runner
The Terminator
I, Robot
The War of the Worlds
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Transcendence
The Fifth Element
2001: A Space Odyssey
WarGames
Westworld
The Machine
Her
The Iron Giant
Automata
The Truman Show
The Prestige
The Martian
The Fly
The Bicentennial Man
Surrogates
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Limitless
Robocop
Electric Dreams
The Island
The Time Machine
The Circle
The Arrival
The Host
The Stepford Wives
The Brain that Wouldn't Die
Frankenstein
The Invisible Man
Metropolis
The Thing
Jurassic Park
Independence Day
Gravity
Artificial Intelligence: AI
Avatar
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
Inception
Interstellar
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Butterfly Effect
The Future.
</ChatGPT>
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/the-shepard-tone-dunkirk-hans-zimmer-video-scale-score-soundtrack-christopher-nolan-inception-prestige-a7862211.html
This is kind of like the plot twist in The Prestige, great movie
I do not watch a film to be blown away by how brilliant another person is, I watch a film to experience a story. If the story is any good, he will not need all these convoluted technicalities. I like other films of his like Insomnia or The Prestige
Agreed, it's hard for me to imagine a situation where you don't get a copy -- in which case the consciousness "forks", and the loss of either one is still a death. It's like that movie The Prestige.
The only case I can see otherwise is one where a person "melds" with a machine, and over time the balance shifts, like the Ship of Theseus.
Perhaps it's really all about communication bandwidth. I got this idea from Vernor Vinge, I think, but it's also just in the air.
That idea can be tested somewhat by considering the opposite case: Not parts combined into a whole, but wholes severed into parts: People with brain injuries, so that they seem to e.g. understand different things depending on which eye sees a thing.
Movies: - 12 angry men - Whiplash - Prestige - American Beauty - The Thing - V for Vendetta - The Grand Budapest Hotel - Gone Girl - Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - Parasite - ... Tarantino or Scorsese movies
Anime: - Howl's Moving Castle - Spirited Away
Not a movie but both great series: - Love, Death & Robots - Black Mirror
The short film "To Be" [1] is a fun exploration of this idea. (The animation is a bit crude, but it's worth watching. There's a low-quality version on YouTube [2].)
The same paradox is a major plot point in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, and in Stanislaw Lem's Star Diaries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Be_(1990_film)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUXKUcsvhQc
Is he in the Prestige? I've seen that movie a bunch of times but I can't recall where he shows up
Surprised it mentions his film appearances, but doesn't mention The Prestige.
The only “trick” is that this preparation seems so boring, so impossibly tedious, that when we see the effect we can’t imagine that anyone would do something so tedious just for this simple effect.
Even magicians who know many tricks will still enjoy the show and appreciate the effort.
Prestige is a great movie about this very topic.
Hugh Jackman does, in the film "The Prestige" - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482571/ - with the inducement being "to perform the greatest magic trick" and one-up Christian Bale.
THIS!
And I'm really creeped out right now. I was about to type this example too and then didn't at the last.
As a side note - My mind tends to race at night. Life has me so busy during the day that when I'm trying to sleep is the only time I get to do much thinking. Thing is, because I'm already tired I never remember much of it the next morning other than "I had a really good think about something last night". Given that I'll not remember, and no-one else will have known, it does seem philosophically compatible and biologically possible that the current me is in effect "dying" every night to make way for a "rebooted" version tomorrow. This is not inconsistent with what we know sleep to be.
The only difference is that there's still only one me.
With the transporter analogy, though, the physical matter is reconstructed at the other side from different matter, which means its a copy. The film "The Prestige" covers this difference brilliantly if you've ever seen it.
Finally, if this comment makes no sense, it's because I'm in bed and my mind is racing.
> An acrobat, dressed entirely in black tights, scaled the building and entered through a window after the committee had completed their search of the room. According to the magicians, "the ghost" was a bit of gauze coated with phosphorescent paint that the acrobat removed from their pocket and waved around the room.
If they made a movie that just reenacted Tibbles and Wynter's illusions and other ingenious acts from the period, it'd be even more fantastical and thrilling than those in The Prestige and The Illusionist.
Google has been doing this for ages, not only with Books results but web search results. If the query is associated with some Entity, it will return various (hopefully useful) about that entity even if they do not contain text involved at all.
This is how, for example the query "that movie where there are two magicians" returns varied results about The Prestige, whereas "that movie where there are four magicians" returns various results about Now You See Me.
A pure text search would likely return very similar results, but the entity mapping heavily impacts the search results.
After reading that, I have a new respect for Nolan as an auteur. He clearly believes in the art of film-making, and not just throwing out big-ticket movies. I've much preferred his more cerebral work such as The Prestige and Intersteller, over big ticket stuff like his Batman Trilogy (and I'm a HUGE Batman fan). I hope he continues down this artistic path.
>If I copy your brain, you won’t be inside it, even if it’s effectively you, as far as anyone else can tell.
If you wake up tomorrow, will you be inside of your brain, even if it's effectively you, as far as anyone else can tell?
What if your awareness is reconstructed daily from the structure of your synapses? If you copy that structure, that copy is you, in the same way that you are now almost the same person as the one that went to sleep yesterday. (Quite like the movie 'The Prestige'.)
12 Monkeys - Travelling back in time to try and track the outbreak of a virus that wipes out most of humanity.
The Abyss - Survival and discovery on a deep water mining platform.
Apollo 13 - Look at the rescue efforts of this historical NASA moon mission. (Does it count as sci-fi?)
The Dish - Also not quite sci-fi, but a comedy about Australia's involvement in the first moon landing.
Battle for Terra - Surprisingly good animated movie about invading aliens.
District 9 - Alien refugee camp in Johannesburg.
Gravity - Astronaut stranded in orbit, trying to get back to Earth.
The Martian - Survival and rescue of a lone astronaut stranded on Mars.
Moon - After a serious accident, a solitary worker on the Moon discovers a conspiracy.
Oblivion - A veteran assigned to extract Earth's remaining resources begins to question what he knows about his mission and himself.
Predator - The classic that launched the franchise.
Predestination - Faithful adaptation of Heinlein's short story, "All You Zombies."
The Prestige - Some minor sci-fi elements. At the end of the Nineteenth Century in London, two stage magicians engage in a battle to create the ultimate illusion whilst sacrificing everything they have to outwit the other.
Source Code - Using limited time-travel to try and get information to stop a second, larger terrorist attack.
WALL E - In the distant future, a small waste-collecting robot inadvertently embarks on a space journey that will ultimately decide the fate of mankind.
Here are my recommendations:
* Sunshine: I'll second this one, about a crew on a mission in space, turns into a different kind of film in the second half, which many people didn't like; has breathtaking visuals and a strong soundtrack.
* Her: A guy falls in love with an AI; has a wonderful atmosphere
* Gattaca: Set in a future of genetic engineering and how the protagonist fights against class discrimination
* Ex Machina, this was pretty hyped I'd say, but takes the opposite approach of Her and shows us the dangers of AI
* The Day the Earth Stood Still: a representative of aliens arrives on earth to tell humans to knock off their douchebaggery; still highly relevant today
* Metropolis: a silent film with a powerful score, set in a future with a large class disparity where the workers rebel
Honorable mentions that I'm not sure are really sci-fi: Brazil, The Prestige, Watchmen
I don't know about other people, but I'd be okay with it.
If I was intentionally copying myself, both the original and the copy would know that there would be another instance on the other side of things afterward, and we wouldn't necessarily know which was which at first.
Just like in The Prestige, or that episode of Star Trek: TNG where Riker got duplicated in the transporter accident, neither wouldn't know ahead of time whether it would be the lucky one, or the unlucky one.
Because of that, I have to settle myself mentally before doing it, and know that it wouldn't be a real me and a fake me. It would be two copies of me--one that made it across the digital barrier, and one that got put back into the biology. The robo-me was born and raised by my parents, just as surely as the bio-me was.
And you don't know my parents. Both of us would be glad to share the burden of dealing with them with someone else that knows exactly what that entails.
And I know right now that it would be the spouse that might not be okay with us sleeping with each other, as they might not buy the "and how is this really different from before?" argument.
I believe The Oatmeal comic was a symptom and not necessarily the cause. It certainly kicked it up another level, but the fanboyism started building a few years earlier with the growing success of the car company followed by the movie The Prestige and the Drunk History episode on Tesla.
don't underestimate your own wisdom here. Rubenstein was just a guy who played piano a lot. You are right about vulnerability. But anyone at any technical level can reach for new stuff. Rubenstein was trying to romaticize something in an old fashioned, deep aubergine velvet sounding way. Of course he had his rep practiced to the point of row row row yer boat facility-- all musicians do who get paid to do it. The point is to have the courage to reach beyond what you have already mastered. Anyone can do this. He just says it in that old school arrogant classical master way-- like "i like to hold myself back from complete mastery so there is a little blood in it". My response to this is: oh Rubenstein! You nutty old master. It surely is ok to admit to everyone that you could not get to perfection if your life depended on it. None of us can, and it is totally cool to admit that. Back then, there was this "the Great Danton" mystique to the magical magical art of classical performership. It was the Harry Potter of then. Even his statements ate supposed to evoke the air of smoky mystery and genuis. Watch the Prestige for an explainer on this era of showmanship and life-altering commitment to this "performance". It is an anachronism. But just like in that movie-- people want to believe its magic. Dig?
Not trying to be snarky, but what's complex about Inception? Once you're past the two premises (you can infiltrate dreams; you can dream recursively) this is just a heist movie without any significant plot twist, by which I mean there is no world-changing or premise-questioning event, and only one apect of said premises (the altered length of "lived time") is explored.
To use other Nolan movies as a point of comparison, Memento and The Prestige are much more accomplished in terms of fully exploiting their concepts. And within the domain of movies exploring the theme of "your lived experience is a dream/illusion", there are much more effective and/or complex examples[1].
I have a feeling that Inception is kind of like Interstellar in terms of public perception: people are psyched by the initial concept, so they don't pay attention to the fact that its underlying narrative structure is pretty run-of-the-mill.
I guess I sound like a buzzkill! If I've missed any deep concept within Inception, I'd be glad to be schooled/enlightened, since I like understanding what makes a movie tick. Also, I don't think it's a bad movie at all, just that it's not that complicated once we're past the initial disorientation.
[1] Before anybody asks, in no particular orders: In The Mouth Of Madness, Mulholland Drive, Paprika, Written By. In a different vein: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Hell, even Total Recall (1990 version) and The Matrix probably apply.
From the moment those copies exist, I'm not them and they're not me. We do not share subjective experiences. If you think we're equivalent and expendable, you'd best murder me in secret and pretend it never happened. You know, like incinerating me inside a teleporter or someth... oh crap, we're going there.
Yeah, I have a few issues with that comic.
> The man was not a murderer.
This is one of a few logical leaps I can't accept. His past selves are already "dead". His future selves do not yet exist. If, for example, all my ancestors are dead and my offspring not yet conceived, how does my suicide harm them in any way? None will so much as feel the grief of losing me, but I'm supposed to feel guilty over "murdering" them? (Let's not follow up on what this would mean for topics such as abortion!)
If future and past selves are of such importance that we not murder them, how can present copies be valued any less? If destroying the original is not necessary, then that must surely be murder as well. It's worse, actually, because then it's not even hypothetical; "The Machine" would be intentionally and unnecessarily ending a life.
Why do I possess the subjective experience of me, not you, and not some other me separated by time or space? Barring notions of a soul, either those other instances are not real in some sense or else there's something phenomenologically special about each, which I can only attribute to being uniquely present at a particular point in space-time. If the teleported me is a clone, their existence ought to have nothing to do with me, thus I should not be murdered for their sake. However, if the teleported me instead can only exist as a function of my past-self ceasing to be, then that's little different than how I am from any moment to the next.
TL;DR: If it works like the movie version of "The Prestige" where one copy is murdered purely for convenience, I'm not stepping into that teleporter.
The movie The Prestige deals with the concept of self copies too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prestige_(film)
You should watch The Prestige[1]
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482571/
Going to repeat a lot of what has been said so far:
- Minority Report (The TV show isn't bad either)
- Ex Machina
- District 9
- Elysium
- Oblivion
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- I am Legend
- Her
- The Martian
- The Matrix (Only 2 & 3 if you're super bored)
- Basically any of the Mad Max series
- Firefly (TV show, movies are OK)
- Dark Matter (TV show)
- Snow Piercer
- American Ultra
- Last Witch Hunter (more fantasy than SciFi)
- Riddick
- Dredd
- X Files (I mean, it's not NOT scifi...)
- Treasure Planet (Yes, the animated one)
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Gets a bad rap for being animated, but it has it's own language and everything)
- Serial Lain Experiments (anime)
- Watchmen
- The Dark Knight
- Inception
- The Prestige (technically SciFi)
I can go on for hours
After watching The Prestige, I decided that I would probably not enjoy dying while an exact copy of me completely replaced me in every aspect of my former life. Then I remembered that Star Trek: the Next Generation episode in which a transporter malfunction created an exact duplicate of Cmdr. Riker, and decided I would not enjoy living while an exact copy of me took over my life, either. Between those two, I totally understand how Dr. McCoy would prefer shuttlecraft to the transporter.
After seeing Primer, I decided I probably wouldn't have to worry about an exact duplicate of myself ever kidnapping or murdering me, or vice versa. But then I played Bioshock Infinite and realized that it would no longer be an exact duplicate after the divergence point, so maybe I would have to worry, and think about what might cause me to turn against me.
So I'm definitely having wires plugged into my head before I die, rather than resorting to having my brain exhaustively scanned so that some emulated copy can go around pretending to be me after I'm dead (or while I'm alive). And if I ever do the latter, I'm definitely adding a feature similar to "reinitialize MAC address" when cloning a VM. If I'm ever going to wake up in a featureless white room surrounded by me, I want every last one of me to know our own serial numbers, so we can all follow my personality differentiation plan.
But no matter what, I'm definitely giving my original meat-body at least a 10% discount on whatever it is that I do, for as long as it can manage to last. I'm remembering that now, so I'd better uphold my end of the deal, if I happen to end up being a digital copy later.
The Prestige explored a similar theme: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482571/
and here I just got down watching him as Tesla from the movie The Prestige; a very good movie about old time stage magicians starring people you would not expect let alone Bowie
How many Jobs/Apple movies do we need?
Seems to be nothing more than cashing in on the iPhone generation's obsession and hype with one particular brand.
Why don't we have a decent Tesla movie? His life and events surrounding his inventions are remarkable, truly engrossing. World-changing in a way that blows Apple Computers or any internal corporate bullshit story or personal Steve Jobs issues out of the park.
Yet, where's the big time Hollywood treatment? Christian Bale as Tesla would work, with a good script and big time visuals spanning the 60 odd years of his life and work. Not cool enough?
The best we have is The Prestige. Great movie, but Tesla is not the focus, only a very interesting side story in that otherwise fictitious world.
FFS Hollywood, get it done! The man had visions of AC motors and dreams of generators at the base of Niagara Falls. Then he moves to America and actually achieves those dreams against all odds.
End of rant. Now, where were we? Ah yes, slow clapping Steve Jobs, the man, the genius. When he gets kicked out of Apple, it truly knifed me in the soul. This movie will be the best thing since we saw one man code Facebook out of nothing but PHP, computers and existing network infrastructure. That too, warmed the cockles.
Well, since the only thing I know about you is that you're on HN, and you haven't told us what you like or don't, or what you've already watched, you're going to get a load of essentially mainstream sci-fi. But that's your own fault.
Cypher - apparently unpopular with everyone except me, but I found it a very stylish, PKD-esque exploration of identity.
The Prestige - this one you'll probably hear elsewhere. It's mostly about the lengths to which someone is willing to go to be the very best at what they do - which obviously has some relevance for the HN crowd.
Watchmen - the only movie I watch again and again. It might be different for those who lived through it, but I love the way it can effortlessly evoke a very different era, cold-war paranoia, vietnam... a real sense of change.
Children of Men - arguably this shouldn't qualify as exceptional, and there's a lot less to say about it. What it is is some very good straight-up action, and then underlying that is a tale of how people respond to the inevitability of death. It's a simple film at heart, but I found it a very moving one.
Princess Mononoke - again, a real sense of the times changing, of conflicts that have to be resolved not by returning to the status quo but by moving forward somehow. Moral complexity everywhere, with no side being outright good or evil. And a beauty to it all even amidst the violence.
cf. The Prestige, one of my favourite films.
Or Prestige, which is on my "top 5 greatest films of all time" list. Along with The Dark Knight.
(The others you mentioned I like, but not top-5 like).
It's not a documentary, it's a docudrama.
So beware! There's enough Tesla hagiography going around as is. For example, the video update claims that he never received a penny for his work, which is not true in the slightest. His patents were licensed, he was paid royalties, he got salary when working for Westinghouse, and got significant funding for many of his large scale experiments. He was also definitely -not- the creator of electricity, and his name was not 'virtually removed from history'. Time magazine put him on the front cover in 1931!
Also, this movie called the Prestige?
Some highly rated movies that I didn't like:
- Bladerunner
- Memento
- The Prestige
- Old Boi
I can't tell if you're trolling or just did not actually test your UI, but beyond the fact that there are three fields that make no sense, submitting the form merely results in: """ (Hidden field pledge_fsq_id) This field is required. (Hidden field turn_fsq_id) This field is required. (Hidden field prestige_fsq_id) This field is required. """
So I'll just post my entry here and y'all can do with it what you will:
Name: A Factory Floor
Description:
If you're looking at this, you probably came from hackernews. You're probably an engineer or someone who can at least tolerate us. Yet, most of y'all are in software so ask yourself: Have you ever been on a factory floor? Or have you just been watching How Its Made on the discovery channel? Google for a local manufacturing business. Some give official tours. Others will gladly do so if you show interest in their business. Fellas: Does your main squeeze yet have a cute picture of you standing looking studly and confused in front of a piece of equipment whose function you can barely describe? Ladies: You may have fingernails that shine like justice, but are you able to tour the facilities while also picking up slack?
Pledge: What is this, NPR?
Turn: Left.
Prestige: Was an OK Movie. Thomas Edison was actually pretty cool though.
Also, if you're not trolling, why does your source code seem to indicate that this is a music player?
I was just talking with a friend about favorite Nolan movies. I can't decide between The Prestige, Inception, and maybe Dark Knight. Sounds like as good an excuse for a movie marathon as I've heard.
The Prestige and Inception have been two of the most literary films of the last ten years. Christopher Nolan keeps getting better and better.
So I'd be interested to read a serious analysis of the new Batman films since it wouldn't surprise me if Nolan has something up his sleeve here at this point. That said, this post is not it, so if anyone has any recommendations please share.
My late-night reading currently consists of the book "Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla
I'd recommend "The Prestige" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482571/
which has a fascinating portrayal of Tesla as a kind of mad techno Wizard (played by David Bowie of all people).
The Prestige and The Departed are from 2006 and I would say 1/2 of what's left sucked. Still, listing a few movies that don't suck is hardly a ringing endorsement.
Pixar demonstrates that it's possible to make 10 movies without 5 of them being terrible. If the rest of Hollywood knew what it was doing you would expect the same quality from Sony pictures etc.
"So what have they done lately?"
Not even counting foreign films, here are some darn good productions from the past five years:
Midnight in Paris, Hugo, Drive, Warrior, Black Swan, Inception, Inglourious Basterds, Up, Whatever Works, The Limits of Control, The Dark Knight, WALL-E, Gran Torino, The Wrestler, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Into the Wild, Ratatouille, The Departed, and The Prestige.
If you find this question interesting then watch "The Prestige". Great film.
http://amzn.to/iiaO5j - aff link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prestige_%28film%29
+1 for recommendation of The Prestige.
Mulholland Drive is also a film worth watching if you enjoyed Inception.
If you enjoyed this film and interpretation, I really recommend watching The Prestige, then reading the following:
SPOILER ALERT
The Prestige has a much better "alternative ending" theory, because it is not well known and very unexpected.
The Prestige ends with all the questions supposedly answered, i.e. the twin thing, the machine that Tesla made, etc. Except that, there is one alternative: the machine never existed! Throughout the entire film, Michael Caine's character keeps insisting that there is only one way to do a transportation act, and that is with a lookalike. We already know that Hugh Jackman's character has a lookalike.
We also never see more than one "replica" of Hugh Jackman. The only time we actually see replicas being created is during the memories written down by Hugh Jackman, except, they could be fake!
In short, it's possible that Christopher Nolan has managed to fool pretty much every audience of The Prestige into believing in Science Fiction, when there is a perfectly logical explanation for the entire film that doesn't require magical explanations. But like the film repeatedly says, "Audiences want to be fooled".
I agree with PaulJoslin's criticism.
It was a good film, but I didn't think it was great, by the end I had a certain hollow feeling, same as I had after Dark Knight or Memento (not after Prestige).
Like in DK, I felt that the plot was overcomplicated, there were too many dream layers, too much was going on. I also missed somewhat longer, continuous action sequences. In Inception, every action sequence was over in 30 seconds, with everything happening in a dream (death just means you wake up), so it removed what little tension these sequences carried. (But then sometimes the in-game rules were broken, eg. the Jap. guy get shot but he doesn't wake up, so from then on shots are lethal? Well I guess not, because at the end everybody is fine after all.)
Interestingly, the overall plot's tension, whether the act of Inception succeeds remained, but the action sequences just didn't work. The plot's overall tension worked for me exactly until they went into yet another dream/coma state called limbo, at which point I just lost interest.
As PaulJoslin said, a much more effective film could have been built on these core ideas.
Even if this was the result of an illusionist, it highlights something I've often thought of, and has come up on HN a few times: that very similar products and movies will come out at just about the same time. The best examples I can give are from movies, and how close together certain movies are made and released, that have very similar plots:
Deep Impact (May 1998) -> Armageddon (July 1998)
The Illusionist (September 2006) -> The Prestige (October 2006)
Paul Blart: Mall Cop (January 2009) -> Observe and Report (April 2009)
These movies came out too close together for one to copy the other, so either the directors and studios were in it together on these movies (entirely likely I suppose: I don't know much about the movie industry; if anyone does know why this occurs, I'd be very interested), or one studio got wind of what the other was doing and made a "copy" before the original even came out, or else something much more subtle is going on.
In the startup / tech world, I think this happens too, because we all tend to follow the same blogs, news sources, etc – so any subtle (probably unintentional) message that makes one of us think of a new product makes 1000 of us think of a nearly identical product, at the exact same time. To me, that highlights execution is so important, and ideas are a "dime a dozen".
For those of you who haven't seen it, the movie The Prestige (IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482571/) deals with this topic of transient existence of people, albeit in the context of magicians and science. It's a very good movie, to boot.
Recommended viewing: The Prestige.
Spoiler alert
From http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482571/synopsis
Angier, who only ever cared about the glory of wowing an audience, went to more terrible extremes. In his version of "Transported Man," he created a double of himself every time he used Tesla's machine, and he rigged the trapdoor to drown the one onstage. He never knew if he would be the Prestige or the man in the box. The room where the machine is being kept is filled with water tanks, all of which hold a drowned double of Angier for every time he performed the trick.
The Prestige (competing magicians inventing new tricks, cameo by Nikola Tesla):
http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/prestige
Iron Man (fun movie where the main character is hacker/inventor):
http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/ironman
There Will Be Blood (not a hacker movie per se, but still kind of startup-relevant, it's about creation of the oil empire from scratch):
http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/therewillbeblood
Odyssey 5 (TV series about a group of astronauts sent back in time to prevent destruction of Earth, AI plays a significant role):
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318236/
Few Japanese cyberpunk animated classics:
Ghost in the Shell 1 & 2:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113568/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0347246/
Akira:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094625/
Bonus: if you liked Primer, you may like also Timecrimes (even though it's not a hacker movie):
http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/timecrimes
Have you seen the less advanced version of those teleporters in the movie 'The Prestige'? Where you shocked about that?
Check out the movie "The Prestige" (http://imdb.com/title/tt0482571/), which (among other things) features David Bowie as Tesla during his time in Colorado Springs.