15 KiB
What movies would you classify as rational or even rationalist?
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Author: u/None *
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URL:
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Score: 57
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Created: 2017-05-26T12:44:08
Post:
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Comments:
u/teakwood54 [+26] (34 minutes later)
Maybe The Count of Monte Cristo. I especially like when he is in prison and is gleaning as much information as possible from the old man to eventually exact his revenge. When the opportunity arises to escape he has a good plan on how to fool the guards.
u/None [+11] (46 minutes later)
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u/teakwood54 [+10] (an hour later)
I've seen the movie and read the book. The movie has a "good" ending where he gets back with Mercedes and loves happily ever after. I definitely prefer the book not only because of that but because it's able to give you more details and his thoughts rather than just his actions.
u/LazarusRises [+25] (5 hours later)
Primer
Circle (not The Circle) - not the movie itself, but the victor is a brilliant rationalist both in arguments and actions
10 Cloverfield Lane - MEW is the smartest horror-movie protag I've ever witnessed, and John Goodman is actually extremely well set-up for the apocalypse
u/alexanderwales [+14] Time flies like an arrow (11 hours later)
I'll second Circle. It's a good example of a bunch of people in a room talking to each other and trying to do some game theory and philosophical arguments. (I give it some leeway for not really answering the bigger question, since it worked for me as a character drama.)
u/LazarusRises [+3] (15 hours later)
I've watched it three or four times now. Amazing how it makes 90 minutes of talking heads so interesting. And following the victor's logical path gets more satisfying on every rewatch.
u/None [+7] (a day later)
I think one of the great points about Primer is how, despite the protagonists acting rationally, they are wrong.
Primer seems convoluted if you assume the time travel works the way the protagonists think it does. However, in reality they got it wrong.
I feel like shit because I can't find the article, but I read a really good breakdown of how there are some rules of the time travel that the protagonists don't understand. I think it's a great film where the idea is having a rationalist piece of fiction where the characters are still in the dark.
u/LazarusRises [+1] (a day later)
Oh man. If you find it please PM me, that sounds fantastic.
u/None [+3] (a day later)
Honestly, I'm never gonna find it. I think it was something like a TVTropes Wild Mass Guessing page or similar. No idea. But I remember it pretty well:
I think the ultimate explanation was that the time travel worked like the time travel in Michael Crichton's Timeline -- parallel universe, not same timeline. The protagonists are confused by the fact that it takes the same amount of time to travel backward as it does forward, but that this is actually not indicative that they remain in the same universe.The reason they see themselves in the past is that it's some other, parallel copy of themselves that acts identical, and not actually them. Plus, the whole stuff with Granger or the phone call -- parallel timeline, no causality conflict.
If you haven't read Timeline, I suggest you do (great book!), but in case you haven't here's one of the main concepts, explained:
There are infinite timelines that progress at different rates "simultaneously" (e.g. there is a timeline we can cross over to that is currently in the Middle Ages).
You can cross over between timelines through the medium of the Quantum Foam.
There are an infinite amount of timelines that have the tech to BOTH disassemble a person and reassemble them in another timeline.
There are also infinite timelines that only have half of this process. They can either reassemble or disassemble but not both. They can still time travel by relying on the other half of the timelines to make up their knowledge gap.
The argument said that our heroes are actually missing some of the technology and that another universe is "helping" them along. We follow (at least initially) one set of heroes who don't realize that the rules keep changing on them as they are "reassembled" in a new universe each time. Then, later on, the heroes change to people who understand it but don't bother explaining it to us the viewer.
I don't think I explained it as well as the initial argument did, but if you see any flaws in it please point them out to me. They might either be my mistake or a general flaw I haven't considered.
u/altch [+4] (a day later)
Also checkout The Vault, a web series by the same creators of Circle.
u/LazarusRises [+1] (a day later)
Awesome! Thank you!
u/None [+1] (4 days later)
Watched based on your recommendation. Really interesting, though man that last episode was not needed. I'd say it's not exactly /r/rational material overall, but definitely fun and interesting. Now who wants to write a rational fic of it? Anybody? Because that would be fucking amazing.
u/DamenDome [+2] (a day later)
Will second 10 Cloverfield Lane. I immediately thought of this community while watching some of her scenes figuring out how to win in her situation.
u/Kishoto [+1] (a day later)
I'll third Circle. Great film and very interesting from a rational perspective.
u/robot_mower_guy [+19] (5 hours later)
The protagonist in Twisted, by Team Starkid, is a rationalist. Check it out.
u/None [+8] (5 hours later)
I'm about 15 minutes into it, it's very funny.
Edit: I finished watching it and I revise my opinion from very funny to really very funny, I am usually not one for musicals but Starkid stuff is really good.
u/robot_mower_guy [+2] (5 hours later)
I found out about them because somebody else posted about it in a similar thread here a year ago.
u/-Vecht- [+2] Legacy of the Goddess (17 hours later)
This was super entertaining and made the better part of a long dull drive pretty enjoyable. Any similar recommendations?
u/robot_mower_guy [+6] (21 hours later)
Same group recently released Firebringer. It takes place in the stone age and is about the discovery of fire. The protagonist is something of an inventor. When I backed it on Kickstarter I thought it wouldn't be very interesting, but I did it anyway because I like the group. The result was amazing.
u/None [+3] (19 hours later)
A very potter musical is also good but I don't know if there are any good recordings.
u/kaukamieli [+2] (20 hours later)
They all are in youtube! Or were when I watched them.
u/None [+3] (21 hours later)
I am trying to find one that's not divided into individual five minute videos.
Edit: found it!
u/DTravers [+13] (23 hours later)
Die Hard, the first one. The bad guy had a well thought-out plan that included the police response, all the things John finds are used and don't feel contrived, and each character can listen in to each other on the radio so communications have to be careful.
u/Calsem [+9] (a day later)
12 angry men. It's a classic.
u/SkeevePlowse [+7] (4 hours later)
Is Primer rational?
I ask this not to cast doubt on your opinion, but because I watched that movie like five times and I still don't feel like I understand it enough to judge.
u/None [+14] (4 hours later)
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u/trekie140 [+6] (6 hours later)
I don't think the story should count as internally consistent if it's too confusing and poorly made to figure out what's going on and the fans end up making graphs to explain the story only for there to still be plot holes left over like what happened with the guy from the future that led to them using the fail-safe machine.
I also didn't buy the characters' motivations as logical when I finally figured out what they were and I don't recall them actually utilizing creative problem solving. I don't get why people praise this movie so much since I think it makes no sense and ultimately accomplishes nothing with its story.
u/SkeevePlowse [+3] (5 hours later)
Fair enough. I fully admit that I don't understand what was going on with Granger to be able to decide if it just happened because the plot required it, but I'll certainly defer the point.
u/mcgruntman [+2] (19 hours later)
Re-watch it with this fan commentary (by the author of Ra). It's very well done. https://qntm.org/commentary
u/mcgruntman [+2] (19 hours later)
It is, in my opinion. Re-watch it with this fan commentary (by the author of Ra). It's very well done. https://qntm.org/commentary
u/The_Magus_199 [+2] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (3 days later)
Oh jeez, frigging Primer. I'm practically addicted to weird time shit, and even still I couldn't make heads nor tails of that thing without a guide. @_@
u/SkeevePlowse [+2] (3 days later)
Oh yeah. It was definitely an enjoyable thriller, and I think that it being confusing helped with the atmosphere, but it was one hell of a tangle.
u/DCarrier [+1] (14 hours later)
Have you tried looking at maps of the timeline? It helps a lot. I'm not sure if I could have figured it out without that even if I did watch it five times.
u/zejaws [+6] (8 hours later)
"No Country For Old Men" goes out of it's way to try and be pretty rationally consistent and explain itself. Plus it's a great movie.
u/traverseda [+4] With dread but cautious optimism (19 hours later)
The expanse, although not a movie, probably counts.
u/michaelkeenan [+5] (17 hours later)
Europa Report is a good sci-fi movie, and fits the rational criteria. There are plot points where other scriptwriters would have had the characters do stupid things for drama, but Europa Report doesn't go that direction. When characters conflict, they have good reasons, driven by their beliefs and values, and they approach the disagreements pretty reasonably.
u/thrawnca [+3] Carbon-based biped (a day later)
It definitely struck me as "hard" sci-fi - especially after seeing Interstellar shortly beforehand!
u/t3tsubo [+4] (a day later)
"Arrival" is rational of you accept the premise that there is no free will and the universe is deterministic
u/None [+1] (a day later)
I can accept the premise for the duration of a movie.
I don't know if I would say that humans have free will, everything we do is a direct result of what comes before and it would probably be silly to say that the processes in a human brain are not deterministic in nature we are too big to be properly random. I don't however think that the universe itself is deterministic in such a way but a wavefunction doesn't exactly have free will just because it could collapse in different ways. My thoughts on free will on determinism are a bit confused and rambling it seems.
u/everything-narrative [+1] Coral, Abide with Rubicon! (4 days later)
Free will isn't about determinism, it's about how it feels when your brain subconsciously plans out your future actions. Whenever it feels like you by an exercise of free will could do something if you wanted to, it's because your brain evaluates the proposed action and finds it to require negligible effort. (You could totally stand up from you seat right now but you can't just go win a Nobel Prize.)
It is this feeling that has prompted ~2000 years of discourse. Also there's a medical term for when people lose this ability.
Humans are deterministic (although currently only in theory) and also they have free will. The feeling of free will is about highly non-trivial planning ability.
u/Schuano [+3] (a day later)
I would argue for the Prestige.
Yes, there is one bit of "real magic" in the movie, but everything else is explained and the motives of the characters are rational with the exception of the initial revenge plot, which both pursue in rational ways.
Also, it's emphasis on how everything can be explained in a magician's tricks is very, very rationalist.
u/zarraha [+6] (3 days later)
The motives of the characters are not even slightly rational. They are entirely insane and ruin their own lives over magic tricks.
You get the power to duplicate things and creatures and humans and instead of using it for massive profit and create an economic revolution you use it to commit serial suicide?
The other guy is slightly less insane but still ruins his own life for one single magic trick.
Maybe it could be considered rational if we assume they are magic-trick-paperclippers, who only value magic tricks and everything else in the world exists only to serve that purpose. This is consistent with their behavior, but I hesitate to use the term rational to describe such an inhuman psychology.
u/Ninmesara [+1] (4 days later)
Please put spoiler tags on the bit of real magic :)
u/arenavanera [+2] (19 hours later)
I think it's unusually hard for movies to be rational. They're under very tight time constraints, which often forces them to skim over obvious plot holes or move the story along by giving someone the idiot ball. Hollywood movies also have to appeal to an absurdly broad audience if they want to be profitable, which pushes them toward the median taste in plots and hurts their ability to experiment.
u/traverseda [+2] With dread but cautious optimism (a day later)
"Spectral" on netflix tries.
u/Pattern_Is_Movement [+3] (2 hours later)
I feel like almost any great movie is rational, having trouble thinking of any exceptions. Anything from 2001: Space Odyssey to a film like 'Wild Strawberries' by Bergman.
u/None [+13] (3 hours later)
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u/Fresh_C [+4] (4 hours later)
I personally define great movies by how entertaining they are and my willingness to watch them multiple times.
Entertainment and rationality definitely aren't mutually exclusive, but the presence of one doesn't guarantee the presence of the other.