4/28/2023 0 Comments Bliss amazon primeThere is a good movie buried deep beneath the layers of simulated worlds in Bliss, after a second-act twist that indeed exposes the film's reality for a fraud. Writer-director Cahill, of speculative fiction oddities like 2011's Another Earth (which tricks you into thinking it's deeper than it is) and I Origins (which doesn't even do that), has again created something that wants badly to convince you it's smart, without actually giving any reason to think that. There's a payoff to all of this, but it's just not interesting enough to warrant nearly two hours of Greg and Isabel trudging through aspiringly metaphysical discussions about the nature of existence that are simply nothing new, even with the perplexing additions of Bill Nye (yes, the Science Guy) and film critic philosopher extraordinaire Slavoj Žižek. Hayek is, unfortunately, trapped somewhere between homeless Manic Pixie Dream Girl and Hot and Smart Lady Scientist, but that's mostly the fault of the script, which zooms both characters around alternate worlds so erratically it never gives them a few moments to develop some believable connection to each other. They engage in a few chemistry-less roller rink montages and then go off in search of a drug that will, Isabel says, bring them back to the real world.īoth Wilson and Hayek are quite good-but that's to be expected, they're good actors. He's soon taken in by free spirit Isabel (Salma Hayek), who convinces him that they're the only people who are "real" and that they're actually living in a simulation. He works at an Office Space-y "Technical Difficulties" department where every employee is obliged to begin every interaction with "I'm sorry," and he is fired due to low productivity. Is what's happening around us really happening? Are we dreaming? Am I the only person who is actually real, and are all the rest of you just products of my subconscious like the projections in Inception? Searching for evidence one way or the other is a potent thought exercise, one that Bliss, the latest movie from writer-director Mike Cahill, utterly wastes.īliss, which is now streaming on Amazon Prime, begins by introducing Greg (played by Owen Wilson), a plodding office worker who sketches his daydreams about a "dream house" perched at the edge of a Mediterranean marina. Dick, and, most recently, philosopher Nick Bostrom (who popularized the chilling computer simulation theory) have all come up with various ideas for what our universe is. Ancient Greek philosophers, Indian and Chinese thinkers, René Descartes, Philip K. The idea that our reality isn't actually real isn't a new one.
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