Hacker Cinema
The Zero Theorem
2013 · Film · 107 min
Directed by Terry Gilliam
A computer hacker's goal to discover the reason for human existence continually finds his work interrupted thanks to the Management; this time, they send a teenager and lusty love interest to distract him.
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19 comments on Hacker News
The story reminded me a lot about the Brazil trilogy, and its spiritual successors, aka the movies Brazil (1985), 12 Monkeys (1995) and Zero Theorem (2013).
The dystopian world in that trilogy is becoming more and more reality and humanity will become a tool for programming more or less in the future, similar to how humans help a supercomputer solve "puzzles" a machine cannot solve.
I always mention a quote from an old friend in this context, who said: "The rat race of economy will force humans to have to do programming in one form or the other, there is no way to avoid it".
To me, the first level of software automation was the 2000s, when each and every company automated themselves with Excel spreadsheets. You'd be mind blown working for a corporate enterprise just by looking a the crazy use cases Excel has. That's the real reason companies cannot migrate away from Microsoft software.
Now we have the breakthrough of agentic coding agents, which eventually will be tools to plug and play into the machine via MCP.
And the next big thing will be the one that helps to make this possible in a training loop, where humans are in the testing and discovery loop of "what to write next", similar to how the supercomputer in Zero Theorem was portrayed (or your story's marketing AI).
In an economic context I highly recommend to watch CGP Grey's "Humans need not apply" (2012) video. Even when the predictions are off, the general truth in it remains, and that's what the job market is seeing now. To me the current software engineer market reflects what CGP Grey predicted at the time, even when it still might be too early to bet all-in into AI and LLMs.
It's impossible to surpass the physical limits of our biological senses. Can a person blind from birth form visual mental images?
We can try to retrain and reuse the sense for other purposes though. I'm reminded of that film "The Zero Theorem".
If you've ever watched the movie Zero Theorem, their data analysts use data captures in fluid dynamics to manipulate and process the data. I always that that was a really interesting concept.
About the movie: It's amazing how much second guessing many / most of these works get. I get that this is a result of the budgets required (although Blade Runner wasn't a high budget movie) and (consequently?) the number of people involved but it's like nobody can resign themselves to trust the original vision (script, visual design) or trust the director. With test showings fraught with the risk of being poorly understood or grossly clumsy in the correction. Major works of art - that must rely on general public ticket sales.
For me, this is one of the movies I re-watch periodically simply for the visuals - the work done on the setting in concept art and the glorious result in turning that into film. "The kind of place the crew of Alien live in when on shore leave", sure, but just a fresh look and well implemented. Certainly hugely successful on that.
Any recommendations on creative fresh looks in recent SF movies? Say the past 15 years?
Mortal Engines was fresh, silly, and fairly well done. And silly.
The Zero Theorem was quirky and worth mentioning... but... too half-assed and grunge, used-furniture that's been done many times?
The Zero Theorem has a brilliant treatment of open seating toward the beginning.
It’s really worth watching the film (that one scene is worth it on its own) but you can get a glimpse of the seating arrangement and the manager after “We is stressed” in the trailer:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fkHrQ30oT9o
I see now that there are plexiglass dividers between the desks. Terry Gilliam is a visionary.
I enjoyed the beginning of Zero Theorem, but the movie tanked after the love interest and super annoying whiz kid showed up.
Go check it out, I was able to see this a couple of months ago. I really enjoyed it, Gilliam has an amazing film style / world building ability.
I really feel transported to another universe/world in his films, Zero Theorem/Dr Parnasis/12 Monkeys/Time Bandits/Fisher King.
I can only imagine what it feels like to finally release this film after so many hurdles.
Love his work, his distribution lately has been rather crap, thumbs up from a random on the internet.
I have to second this. I used to watch some really "mindfucked" movies on Netflix. I think I watched The Cube, The Zero Theorem, and Brazil, partly because Netflix had recommended them to me. Now? Those movies don't even show up in the entire recommendation list. In fact, most of what shows up is series I know I won't like. I still subscribe but it's a letdown how the recommendation system incentives have changed.
See the movie the Zero Theorem for an example of your game.
You'd probably appreciate the movie Zero Theorem. The hero, a coder, is doing the same procedure...it's by the Monty Python people.
Wonderfully done. Both this and the Domestic Robocop one they did six years ago linked by 'Karunamon. I appreciate the density. Lots of detail to read into.
Two pieces this was reminiscent of and I'd suggest, if you're interested, are:
Black Mirror especially Series 1 Episode 2 "Fifteen Million Merits" and Terry Gilliam's Zero Theorem
"Nice guy" just means "person the audience can relate to". Phil isn't nice, but he's definitely relatable (if that's a word).
This struck me in particular with Gilliam's The Zero Theorem which I saw recently. I generally really like Gilliam films, but I struggled with Zero Theorem precisely because the main character was so unrelatable.
This reminds me of the coding visualization from the movie The Zero Theorem. There doesn't seem to be any clips of it online, but here's a screencap from it [1].
[1] http://cdni.wired.co.uk/1920x1280/a_c/08_2.jpg
"If you haven't watched a 12 year old play Minecraft, you need to do so. It's the ultimate fantasy universe, and the way you combine elements to make something new is very analogous to programming in the vanilla game."
Watching my 5 yo work in Minecraft reminds me of the programmer "crunching entities" in the movie "The Zero Theorem".
You are not alone. I despise stand-ups with a passion. It is not because I haven't given them a shot - I have spent (wasted) ~1000 x 15 min (avg) of my life on this useless misery with nothing to show for it but an overabundance of stomach acid.
In my last job (best one of my career so far), I was able to convince my superb director that stand-ups suck and he allowed us to replace them with a meeting-free written-by-a-certain-time variant. What followed for our team was one of the most productive periods that I have ever witnessed. This contrast convinced me that stand-ups are one of the reasons development has started to suck for most developers; we are being gang-statused to death by cargo-culting ignoramuses. When I saw the movie Zero Theorem, I instantly sympathized with poor Qohen Leth - he just wants to work but is constantly harassed and statused by various minders, who really should not exist in an efficient workplace.
In my current job, this tired old stand-up specter rose its ugly head once again today, for reasons that have nothing to do with the development team's productivity. I am ready to quit if it actually makes an appearance - my notice is ready in my drafts folder.
it is my belief that oculus will sell a lot of devices largely by manipulating the ad copy, resulting in frustrated people out a lot of money, i suppose i am attempting to include another perspective on the device, one that i failed to see before i bought one, and have yet to see since, but feel confident in my understanding of it
i suppose it depends on your definition of virtual reality..
but i think the verbiage of vr is very misleading
my position is that if oculus was called: oculus digital stereoscopy; the tech would lose a lot of its hype
as for the tracking it is certainly the best feature of the headset, again with the goal of calling the thing what it does i refer to the 'head tracking' as 'inferred spherical screen encapsulation'
what the head tracking is doing is windowing your vision to the size of a fisheyed cell phone screen and then inferring your position in a 3d space and displaying the contents of that field of view on the screen, refreshing the content of the image in regard to the movement of your neck, giving you the impression that you are in a sphere of flat displays looking through fisheye glasses with blinders with a forced forward stare
when i put it on the restricted periphery and the inability for me to use my eyes to look around was the most dramatic realisation
but that is just dismantling the vr hype, actual stereoscopy is flawed in its own ways..
peoples eyes differ in distance apart, the oculus is solid plastic, certainly the error is measured in mm to fractions of mm but that is still error that your brain now is required to correct,
also the goggles press against your face tightly to seal out distracting ambient light, this hurts after some time, and in the case of my watching a film, completely depleted my eyes of blood leaving white bags under my eyes
that is the hardware
as for the software if you read the comment i linked in the comments you are referring to i talk about an experiment i performed when i first received the oculus that shows that the brain error corrects the inconsistencies between the eye inputs at a pretty substantial distance, talking here of the blue and pink box experiment, in the experiment only the pink box moves, but when i showed it to a friend thae asked why when the two boxes began overlapping did the blue one start moving as well? i watching this all cloned on the screen in front of me explained that it still was the case that only the pink one moved and the blue one is being moved around by thaer brain, so if a simple experiment has my brain working overtime shifting still objects it would seem reasonable that a lot of the 'jitter' that is so often talked about when displaying entire worlds is your brain organising its inputs
as for what i believe is the right direction?
if we are talking about visual input manipulation.. i'd think projection, perhaps onto a dome or disc encapsulating the entire eye range including periphery of the eyes even with the pupil extended to the outer most regions of the eye
or one fantasy device i dreamed up used this recent research: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/magnetic-hair-directs-water-flow-0806 ; if you watch the video, at the end, 57s in, you can see these hairs bending optics, what you'd do is have two rows of these hairs, one for each eye and each row bends to follow the movement of a pupil and each hair acts as a pixel
this way simulates two photons bouncing off a single object and reaching the eye, that would be wild
but mind that i referred to the effort as visual input manipulation, if you want to talk vr i think the only possible direction is bypassing our sensors and interacting directly with the processors, a la the suit in Zero Theorem : http://cdn-static.denofgeek.com/sites/denofgeek/files/styles/insert_main_wide_image/public/zero_theorem.jpg
I rather have the feeling there wasn't much there. All that new dystopian action movies are just the basic and shallow action movies we had with a distopian theme on it. I watched Elysium recently. You could have this without the SciFi part also.
I haven't seen a good dystopian movie in a long time. I was however also not very happy with Zero Theorem but they tried to do something different at least.
My relationship with Hollywood is this: I'm always happy they do something with SciFi. No matter how bad it is. People like SciFi atm and this brings money to ideas which also rises the chances of one really good movie. Then it all was worth it.
Same goes for TV shows. Black Mirror has been mentioned here. What a great show! But it was a great time for SciFi also. Look how many episodes Star Gate got. I couldn't watch it because it was so shallow but many people liked it and it was great for the genre.
As much as I love Terry Gilliam I find his films like Zero Theorem and even Brazil very challenging to watch the whole way through. I always think they are absolutely genius for the first 30 minutes or so then my interest always starts to slowly fade.
Similar to most of the Monty Python films.
It's like a desert you can only eat in small batches but delivered in full cake size.
Kind of peculiar that I just watched the Zero Theorem tonight. Christopher Waltz talks to a computerized shrink in the movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zmDElFUUBw