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| Wander an Isla of despair until you discover the Will to live. |
The 2017 search for interesting science fiction in Hollywood is over (
nominated films). The SIHA award winner for this year is
The Discovery.
Only the lonely
I've looked around enough to know
That you're the one I want to go
Through time with
-
Time In A Bottle by Jim Croce
On one level, we can view
The Discovery as a love story. Jason Segel (in the role of neurobiologist
Will Harbor) and Rooney Mara (as
Isla, the suicidal mother of a drowned boy) meet "by chance" on a ferry boat ride to an enchanted island where they fall in love, as they were fated to do.
But no. That would be a different movie;
The Discovery is a romantic
science fiction movie and we do not have to view this story as a magical fantasy. So I'm going to get excessively nerdy and technical while I over-analyze
The Discovery...
"
It’s a true case of the viewer getting from a film what they themselves bring to it." -
Paul Klein
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| ...let's think about this... |
What if we could put our memories in a bottle and send them back to ourselves across the ocean of time, back to an earlier time point in our lives? Would we be able to learn from our future self?
Information age
Will Harbor is on a mission that he can't remember. He keeps having little cognitive spasms and he experiences quick flashback-like images, but those haunting fragments of stray information do not seem to deflect him from bumbling along through his life the way we humans do. Maybe he can dismiss his odd memory fragments by telling himself that he is under stress and nervous about returning home to confront his evil scientist father, Thomas.
The Evil Scientist
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| "Maybe it would." |
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"If you knew what came next after
you died, would that matter to you? |
Thomas
Harbor (played by Robert Redford) is presented to viewers as some kind of emotionally stunted monster who refuses to take responsibility for the consequences of his scientific research program. We learn that
Will used to work in collaboration with Thomas on consciousness research, but then
Will abandoned their shared research, leaving his father to complete the project and announce his startling discovery to the world.
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Doubting Thomas kills himself in order to get a
glimpse of another plane of existence. |
Too much information
Viewers of
The Discovery learn that Thomas has been using a machine that can reversibly take people to the edge of death. Results from near-death experiments reveal that some manifestation of a person's consciousness can seemingly continue to exist after someone dies.
Will simply wanted to study and learn about the physical nature of human consciousness, but Thomas went "a step too far";
results obtained with his {reversible} killing machine showed the world that consciousness can continue after we die.
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| Will is horrified by the suicide epidemic. |
The unquestioned starting premise of
The Discovery is that scientific evidence for life after death would trigger a suicide epidemic that sweeps the world. In the two years since Thomas reported his scientific results, the deaths of over four million people have been attributed to the discovery of evidence for life after death. And just to ramp up the angst, one character in the story suggests that it is just a matter of time before a new cadre of mass murderers starts killing everyone in order to help others move along towards their next life.
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| The Discovery |
While still officially inside the part of this blog post called "too much information", I want to say that there is (mercifully) not too much Hollywood in this film. And that is a good thing. Even the Sci Fi cliché of
the evil scientist is used with
finesse; the complexity of Thomas as a character is gradually revealed during the film and his actions are shown to be nuanced.
Even with all of the suicides, corpses and one on-screen murder,
The Discovery is more of a mystery story than a
horror story. For me, the most annoying part of the movie is the sound track. I don't usually notice or think about the background sounds of movies, but during
The Discovery, occasionally the volume level rises and we are subjected to
VERY loud and annoying thuds that are supposed to tell us that something dramatic is happening.
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| don't annoy the audience |
And then, at other times, the volume of the dialog
drops to barely audible levels when some character mumbles a line and we are left wondering if we just missed some profound clue that might explain the mystery of what is going on. The first rule of film should be:
1) this is entertainment, don't annoy the audience. Duh. I'm thankful I did not see this movie in a theater. Watching at home, at least I could manually turn the volume up and down.
The Discovery
For as long as there have been humans, we have been telling each-other stories. We enjoy inventing solutions to the mysteries of life such as our unseen origins and our future fates. To some extent, we all tend to exist in a self-constructed world of fantasy rather than simply admit to ourselves that our minds are just severely constrained and limited memory storage devices. We have fun inventing fantasies about more interesting worlds where maybe there is something more to life than just bumbling through one imperfect set of years to a dead end. I've seen it suggested (
here) that
The Discovery is a fantasy that is similar to Nietzsche's imagined "
eternal return". Are we all in some sort of infinitely repeating cycle of lives that start and restart and never end?
"
The most important fact of human life is the infinity of space....does infinity as an object of experience daunt the human mind?" -
Jan Holberk Vaenz LXII
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| let me try that again |
As humans, we are dual beings. We exist, trapped, within the limited cognitive universe of our personal memories. However, with the help of imagination, we constantly explore the negative space of the vast unknown universe that surrounds us. As social mammals who share language and culture, our minds are shaped by the stories that become popular memes, passing from mind to mind down through the centuries. Stories of life-after-death provide some of the most popular human memes.
According to
Taylor Holmes, "In Buddhism, the goal is to achieve perfection through constantly retrying and redoing a failed life." This kind of process for perfecting a failed life is what the main character,
Will Harbor, spends his time doing in
The Discovery. The romantics among us can believe that
Will is constructing and perfecting a life that will be spent happily with
Isla: a new life in a new world that will erase the horrible dystopic world that
Will was stuck in at the start of the movie.
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| "No, Will, I'm only a part of you... a memory." |
Science Fiction
The Discovery is good science fiction because it starts with a new (and imaginary) scientific advance and then plays around with how people react to that new scientific discovery. The weavers of this story (
Justin Lader and
Charlie McDowell) do not bother to try to tell us any scientific details about the discovery at the start of the film, instead they dive into showing us how people have reacted to the discovery that it is possible to detect what looks like continuing thought processes in the brains of dead people, new thoughts that are being generated after they move on to a new existence.
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| What next? |
Due to expectations arising from their religious beliefs, some people assume that the existence of an "afterlife" has been scientifically demonstrated to be objectively real by the experimental results that were generated by Thomas. Further, after learning about this scientific discovery, some people (millions of people around the world) kill themselves, apparently in an attempt to speed up their movement on to a new life.
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Doubting Thomas needs scientific proof
that there is life after death. |
The burden of all these suicides falls on both Thomas
Harbor (who made the discovery) and his son,
Will. During the events depicted in the movie, Thomas and
Will are struggling to deal not only with the new suicide epidemic that is resulting in the deaths of millions of strangers, but also with the earlier suicide of
Will's mother. We are told that she apparently killed herself because she was unable to compete successfully against Thomas' obsessive effort to pursue his scientific muse, an obsession that ultimately demonstrated the existence of some sort of life after death.
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| A shocking discovery! |
The Discovery is also good science fiction because it depicts Thomas' discovery as being a work in progress. Nobody completely understands what sort of life comes after death, only that there seems to be
something there. This uncertainty captures the nature of scientific endeavors: seldom do newly discovered scientific "facts" efficiently and quickly wrap up a mystery with a neatly tied bow.
Will is drawn into the on-going process of trying to make sense of his father's discovery of life after death. As an outside observer,
Will does not share his father's obsessive drive, a drive that now seems directed towards making everyone in the world adopt a view of life after death as a simple fact that should be accepted for what it is and not condemned because of the suicide epidemic it has spawned.
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Can you put a scientific discovery
back in the bottle? |
In fact,
Will hopes that it might be possible to put this genie back in the bottle. Maybe Thomas could lie and say: "I was wrong, I did not really discover evidence for life after death. My mistake. Now stop killing yourselves!" After Thomas refuses to voluntarily end his research project,
Will then tries to sabotage his father's on-going experiments. And then
Will dabbles in well-intentioned scientific fraud by trying to spread the incorrect idea that Thomas' equipment only reveals the latent memories that remain in the brains of dead people.
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| near-death |
Right at the start of this film, there is one more important backstory fact that is revealed about
Will. He is haunted not only by his mother's past suicide, but also by jumbled and confused memories that he believes might be from his own childhood: what he seems to remember as a
near-death experience of his own.
Story behind the Story
The Discovery is also good science fiction because it inspires the creation of fan-fiction. In the remaining part of this blog post (below) I'm going to let my imagination play around with
The Discovery. This involves wedging
The Discovery sideways into the
Exodemic Fictional Universe.
Search for Aliens
There is no mention of
aliens in
The Discovery. Viewers are supposed to take it on faith that humans simply have the ability to die and then "re-live" important moments in the past. However, if
The Discovery is a science fiction story rather than just a fantasy, then there could be some scientific explanation for what is going on.
What if alien visitors to Earth secretly provided we humans with a type of technological environment that can allow us to "travel back in time"? Also,
what if the aliens want to keep the existence of time travel secret? The aliens know that humans can't be trusted with knowledge of the existence of either alien visitors to Earth or time travel. Aliens who take pains to hide their existence from us is one solution to the
Fermi Paradox.
What if it is only when the aliens occasionally allow Earthlings access to time travel technology that "we" are given an opportunity to help create a new
Reality, a new timeline? Further, while we humans live our lives, we are usually not allowed to be aware that time travel is possible, even when we actually are having our lives altered by the application of time travel technology. Further, the aliens also have "
Reality Viewing" technology and under some
unusual conditions, humans can get a look at another Reality, without actually "going" there. As
Isla says: look at the advertising brochure for a resort before you actually travel to a tourist destination.
Maybe those "
unusual conditions" are only present right after we die. Why should that be true?
Endosymbionts and Infites
Imagine that we humans are dual beings. Long ago (about 2,000,000,000 years ago) aliens (like
these) arrived and inserted their advanced nanotechnology into the structure of our planet. During the course of evolution, every living organism on Earth became a hybrid mixture of biological cells and invisibly small
zeptites.
What if the aliens are letting we humans make use of time travel technology so as to help to bring into existence a new, better Reality. And
what if when we are given a chance to use time travel technology, it is not an entire person who is sent back into the past?
What "travels back in time" is not an entire person, but just some
infites, a packet of memories, that can alter the behavior of a person so as to bring into existence a new, better Reality. If so, then maybe our world is being gradually constructed by means of a collaborative effort: ours is a world made better by alien technology
and alien support of our own well-intentioned efforts to fix things and make a better world.
Time travel
Most people prefer to view
The Discovery through the lens of religion, but for me (as a science nerd) this is a time travel story. Aliens know humans should not be allowed to know that time travel is possible. As soon as Thomas makes his discovery (what he actually discovers is that time travel is possible), the aliens must quickly act to correct Earth's timeline and erase human knowledge of the existence of time travel.
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| Oliver is saved. |
By the end of
The Discovery we learn that
Will's jumbled memories of a possible near-death experience when he was 5 years old are actually caused by his need (his will, his desire) to make himself remember in "his next life" (the next Reality) that he must act to prevent the drowning death of
Isla's 5 year old son, Oliver. After repeatedly "going back into time" to save
Isla from drowning herself,
Will finally realizes that he must go further back in time and save Oliver. As
Isla says in
Will's "dream" near the end of
The Discovery: "There is more than one way to save me." If Oliver is saved then
Isla will also be saved, too.
Replicoids
In order to make their time travel project viable, the aliens long ago invented a way to defeat
the butterfly effect. Each person on Earth has a corresponding
replicoid within the
Hierion Domain. The existence of those replicoids is what generates the required
temporal momentum that assures the same people are found in each successive Reality of Earth's
Reality Chain.
Bimanoid Interface
We humans are constantly connected to our replicoid by means of a communications link that involves our
zeptite endosymbiont. Normally, any communication with our replicoid only works at the level of our subconscious mind. When our biological brain cells start to die after death (
define "death" as being when the heart no longer beats), the "brain wave" detecting equipment that was invented by Thomas
Harbor can still detect a signal coming from the zeptite endosymbiont remaining inside the dying person.
When a human dies, their replicoid (inside the Hierion Domain) automatically (with the help of alien technology) begins to view a possible new Reality that would come into existence if some of "their" memories were sent back in time. The replicoid contains an exact copy of every memory from the person who just died.
Sadly, there were no
aliens written into
The Discovery, but in my dreams this film can be imagined as a
pilot for a television series in which we get to find out what happens next to
Will, Oliver and
Isla. In such a sequel it could be revealed that aliens had provided the time travel technology that allowed
Will to "go back in time" and save Oliver. I put "go back in time" in quotes because this sort of time travel technology only allows Earthlings (or, more precisely, their replicoids) to send packets of information back in time.
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| The Discovery II |
I'd also like to imagine that by "traveling back in time",
Will has erased/prevented his father's discovery and the suicide epidemic never happens. However, the timeline of Earth is far from perfect and the aliens are planing a new mission in time... once more they need some human helpers...
a 2023 conversation with Bard (2024 note: our "good friend" at Google decided to destroy links to user conversations with their AI chatbot, now called
Gemini) ...on the road to
SIHA 2018
2017 SIHA nominations
2016 SIHA awards
Next: more time travel: "
The Golden Man"
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