Is it possible to be a genius in an age when anyone can Google anything or ask their very own digital Jeeves? It’s been hundreds of years since famous intellectuals could simultaneously be true experts in fields as varied as mathematics and music, philosophy or physics. Today the depth of knowledge required is just too great. It’s a question of knowing how to look for facts, rather than deducing your own. And yet we are constantly told to reach out for our true potential because biologically at least we are using a fraction of the brain’s thinking power.
Perhaps the miracle of modern medicine can provide an answer to the world’s obvious lack of fearsomely intimidating brainiacs. Limitless is based on the novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn and tells the story of Eddie, played by The Hangover’s Bradley Cooper, a “novelist” with a book contract, a hot girlfriend (Abbie Cornish) and the looks of a beggar, and not much else.
With not a word of his masterpiece written his girlfriend rapidly becomes his
ex. Eddie hits rock bottom and inspiration looks to be about as likely as a
knighthood for Andy Coulson. But then his ex brother in law turns up, out of
the blue, leaving him a pill that utilises every synapse in the brain so it’s
running at 100%. Take the pill and you become a silent superhero, a 21st
century, pharmacy fuelled genius.
I had a hypothesis about Limitless. I’d heard about the concept and it was undeniably cool. I mean what would you do with an enhanced version of yourself that knew no limits? Maybe you’d end world hunger, sort out peace in the Middle East, come up with the next Harry Potter series and have some fun with attractive people you’d usually be too scared to approach along the way.
However this being a Hollywood release it was fairly obvious that Eddie would go crazy and live it up, earning big bucks on Wall Street, squandering his drug pumped intelligence on boring investment dialogue. He’d finish his “grandiose” novel in a montage and be in predictable debts with dodgy Eastern Europeans in the blink of an eye, moaning about it all in a moronic and mostly insufferable voiceover.
In fairness to Limitless the endless possibilities behind the concept are practically impossible to convey. Director Neil Burger does throw in some visual trickery to illustrate the highs of the drug and the panicky amnesia that follows. But the rush of inspiration and satisfaction after finishing a novel doesn’t translate onto film via Cooper’s swagger or a tumble of CGI words falling from the ceiling as he types.
Anyway back to my hypothesis. Essentially I thought that the interesting premise, once squeezed through the demands of modern entertainment, would end up as merely a passably adequate film overall. Stephen Fry, national treasure and king of Twitter, tweeted a while ago that Limitless was silly but
fun. I thought that everyone would reach more or less the same conclusion.
Despite dealing with themes like drug dependency and the potentials of the human character, Limitless skips over meaningful answers in favour of an alright watch.
The only moments that push entertainment levels above the mediocre are ones where the audience are laughing at the film, rather than with it. For example when Eddie’s ex girlfriend is trapped by a pursuing murderer (I won’t waste time mentioning plot holes) and she must take a pill to think her way out of it, she decides to sprint across an ice rink and swing a child into her attacker’s face. Yup, that’s modern genius for you.
Don’t let it be said that at Flickering Myth we do not test our hypotheses with carefully controlled experiments. I invited three lab rats to my home, lulled them into a false sense of normality with popcorn and then issued them with scientifically designed score cards to rate Limitless. Here are the results.
As you can see, Guest 1 thought Limitless was “Ok”…
…as did Guest 2.
Guest 3 decided to try to mess with my system and write some thoughts on the back of her scorecard, hence the scrawled “P.T.O”. She wrote some kind of valid stuff about Limitless being immoral because it doesn’t really show that drugs have bad consequences and it only has a 15 certificate, all of which I decided to leave out of my review. After all it’s only a bit fun, which as even she acknowledged, was Ok.
Limitless is available on Blu-Ray and DVD from the 1st of August
DVD Review: As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me
Last year Peter Weir made his directorial return with The Way Back, a star studded and old fashioned tale about the possibly true and possibly grossly exaggerated escape of a group of Polish prisoners of war from a Siberian gulag. Its critical reception was mixed, with some praising the film’s ambition and visuals, whilst others bemoaned its fatal lack of emotional engagement. However a German film, As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me, beat Weir’s epic to the broad concept by nine years.
Released in 2001 As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me, now available on DVD, follows a German officer fleeing from imprisonment on Siberia’s easternmost shore. And for this reason its ethical foundations are considerably flimsier and more controversial than The Way Back’s.
This is saying something because The Way Back was based on a bestseller by Slavomir Rawicz, which since publication, has been disputed and branded a fake from a number of sources. And yet Weir’s film is unlikely to be attacked for historical bias of any kind. The story of Poles and Jews getting one over on their persecutors, be they German or Russian, is a common and acceptable one. Make your hero a German who has fought for a Nazi controlled state and buying into the character becomes far more complex.
Some might say that the way in which As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me is told twists and distorts historical fact. We see Bernhard Betterman’s Clemens Forell hug his wife and young daughter goodbye on the platform in 1944 Germany. Then we cut swiftly to Forell being sentenced to 25 years forced labour in Siberia. He is charged with war crimes but the implication is that Forell is being unfairly condemned by corrupt and vengeful Communists. Then there is a long and grim train journey across the cold expanse of Russia, with glimpses of the grim hardships to come. Finally, exhausted from malnutrition and a hike through the snow, they are thrust into life at a camp.
Throughout all of this we discover nothing about Forell’s war record and his potential sins and little too about his political sympathies. He is shown to be a compassionate and brave man though; in other words a typical hero. He treasures the picture of his family and uses it for galvanising motivation that replaces the sustenance of food and drink. It is never explicitly mentioned during the camp scenes and moments of inhumane, cruel punishment but the shadow hanging over the story the whole time is that of Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. You can’t help but feel uneasy as your sympathies inevitably gather around Forell in his struggle.
Of course the debate about the moralities of the Second World War and the balance of its sins can hardly be squeezed into a film review. Indeed the sensible view is probably to admit that it’s an unsolvable problem; evil was committed on both sides on an unimaginable scale. Stalin’s Russia was carrying out atrocities throughout the 1930s, long before the worst of Hitler’s cruelties were inflicted and on a larger scale than the Holocaust. It’s impossible to reason with or categorize such statistics of death and horrific eyewitness anecdotes. But this is a film that unavoidably makes the viewer think about such issues and not necessarily in the best of ways.
I don’t object to a story from a German soldier’s perspective. In fact I find it refreshing and necessary to witness an often overlooked point of view. But As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me glosses over too much at times, so that it becomes ethically dubious, compromising and limiting your investment in the narrative. The filmmakers will probably argue they are simply telling the story from Forell’s viewpoint alone. I think this argument falls down because of the film’s other weaknesses in plausibility though.
As Forell slowly makes his way back, first through Siberian snow, then Siberian summers and on through other outposts of the USSR, in a muddled route elongated by the help and hindrance of kind (and not so kind) strangers, we are continually shown glimpses of his waiting family in Germany. These scenes are so unconvincing that they spark the questions about the rest of the film.
The lives of his family are completely unaffected by the war, with only two exceptions; one is his ever present absence and the other a throwaway remark by the son Forell has never met, which his mother labels “Yankee talk”. Presumably they have therefore encountered American occupiers in some way. Forell’s daughter is only ever shown getting upset or dreaming about her lost father. I’m not being callous but the girl was young when her father left and her reaction is so simplistic that it punctures the believability of the entire story. I’m not saying she wouldn’t be absolutely devastated by her father’s absence but she would perhaps have moved on in some way. The possibility of Forell’s wife finding another man is never raised and they never give him up for dead.
All of this, coupled with the chief of security from the Siberian camp pursuing Forell across Russia like an ultimate nemesis, transforms As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me into am unrealistic fairytale. Forell is helped by a Jew at one point but the issue is merely touched upon. The period elements of this film are so secondary that they become redundant, but then the film does not claim to be “inspired by true events”.
It’s possible to enjoy this film if you look at it as simply one man’s impossible journey back to his impossibly perfect family. At way over two hours long, As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me is hopelessly brutal at times but somehow snappy too. It’s an engaging enough example of traditional storytelling, despite my doubts, but the only truths to be found are symbolic and stereotypical.
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