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grendelkhan comments on Limitless, a Nootropics-Centered Movie - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (33)
It looks like any major-movie adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story--a solid SFnal hook, filed down so far that it's just another inoffensive popcorn movie. It's the nature of the beast.
In one of those angels-on-a-pin discussions of hardness in SF, I proposed (though I'm sure someone else has done it first) that hard stories are hard because they play fair by their own rules, that they introduce a change and don't just use it as a clever metaphor or bit of snappy attire, but truly take it seriously. SF in movies is more like fantasy, where events are driven by the moral and plotwise needs of the story; Aslan asspulls "deep magic" because it's a story about resurrection, and I'm sure the protagonist of Limitless will learn humility and either return to his original life or a slightly shinier version thereof or die in a tragic self-sacrifice, rather than changing the world, because it's not a story about changing the world.
The annoying thing is that it's not inevitable in movies; it's just an attractor, a set of well-worn grooves that, absent a very strong countervailing force, the stories will regress to.
I just discovered this thread. I don't know if you've seen the movie yet, but if you avoided seeing it for the reasons you mentioned here, I would recommend actually watching it. Especially this one:
It's a bit more imaginative than that.
I noticed--I was very surprised indeed. (I also appreciated the "I can't think my way out of a knife!" bit--the power of intelligence, indeed.) It's more unambiguously positive than the original ending, even--definitely not what I was expecting. This kind of story is inevitably going to end up being about someone who changes the whole world, and hey, that's what the movie fades out on. I'm impressed.
Limitless doesn't appear to be based on a Philip K. Dick story; I think you're thinking of The Adjustment Bureau instead.
I should have been clearer there; I didn't mean that it was an adaptation of a PKD story, just that it followed the same process, of taking a mind-bending bit of SF and squeezing it into a standard Hollywood box.
In this case, at least they didn't claim to be "adapting" anyone's work, like what happened with I, Robot.
It actually is based on a novel, although the marketing for the film hasn't played up this fact.
Well, egg on me; that's definitely the sort of thing I should have checked on first. Thanks for pointing it out.
I'll attempt to save face by claiming that "technothrillers" are pre-watered-down, in that they're written in a format which is conducive to world-changing stories, and include technology that would indeed be world-changing, but shy away from their conclusions the same way that mainstream movie adaptations shy away from the conclusions of their source material.