emergence
19 films tagged with “emergence”
Tenet
Most espionage films ask their protagonist to acquire information. Tenet asks its protagonist to operate without it. The Protagonist — unnamed, because naming would imply a stable identity that the film's structure works…
Blade Runner 2049
The question the first film asked was whether a manufactured being could be conscious. The question this film asks is whether a manufactured being can reproduce, and the difference between those two questions is the diff…
Interstellar
Professor Brand's lie is the centre of the film, and it is worth taking apart because it is not a simple deception. Brand has spent decades working on an equation that would allow humanity to manipulate gravity well enou…
Her
Her is the most accurate film about consumer artificial intelligence ever made, and it achieves this without a single scene about capability. Nobody in it asks whether Samantha is conscious, tests her, or worries about a…
Synecdoche, New York
Caden Cotard receives a MacArthur grant and uses it to build the most ambitious theatrical production anyone has ever attempted: a life-size reproduction of New York City inside a warehouse in Manhattan, populated by act…
Paprika
The parade is the image that stays. A procession of refrigerators, Shinto gates, tin dolls, daruma figures, brass bands, and household gods marches through Tokyo with the formal logic of a religious festival, and the str…
A Beautiful Mind
The Nash equilibrium describes a state in a game where no player can improve their outcome by changing strategy alone, given the strategies of all other players. It is one of the most important ideas in twentieth-century…
eXistenZ
Cronenberg's speculative technology is not digital but biological. The game pods in eXistenZ are grown from synthetic amphibian eggs, they connect to the player's spinal cord through an umbilical cord plugged into a surg…
The Iron Giant
The Iron Giant does not know what it is. This is the film's first and most important structural choice: the robot arrives damaged, its memory erased, its purpose unavailable to itself. It does not know where it came from…
Dark City
Every night at midnight the city stops. The people fall asleep where they stand — in the street, on a staircase, in the middle of a sentence — and a group of pale figures in long coats emerge to rebuild. They rearrange t…
Pi
Max Cohen restates his assumptions at the beginning of the film: mathematics is the language of nature; everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers; if you graph the numbers of any system, patt…
Ghost in the Shell
The question the film poses is not whether an artificial mind can be conscious. It is whether a human mind, having replaced enough of itself, still is. Major Kusanagi's body is entirely prosthetic — manufactured, maintai…
Twelve Monkeys
The scientists in 2035 send James Cole to 1996 and he arrives in 1990. They try again and he arrives in the trenches of the First World War. They pull him back, recalibrate, and send him to the correct year, where he ide…
Akira
The opening image is an explosion — a white sphere expanding outward from the centre of Tokyo in 1988, swallowing the city in a single frame. The film never explains what the explosion was, and this is its first structur…
Videodrome
Brian O'Blivion is the first character in cinema to understand that a medium is not a delivery mechanism but an environment, and to draw the conclusion that an environment, given enough time and exposure, does not merely…
Stalker
Something happened in a corner of an unnamed country, and afterwards that corner stopped obeying the rules. The government fenced it off, posted soldiers, and stopped explaining. What is left inside is the purest depicti…
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Roy Neary is driving a power company truck down an Indiana road when something comes over the hill and lights him up. He does not know what it is. What he knows, afterwards, is that he has received a signal, and the sign…
Solaris
The ocean on Solaris responds. That is the established scientific fact at the beginning of the film, and it is also the end of what anyone can say with confidence. An entire discipline — Solaristics — has been built arou…
The Battle of Algiers
The chalkboard scene is the one the Pentagon screened. Colonel Mathieu stands before his officers and draws a pyramid. At the top is the FLN's military command. Below it, zone leaders. Below them, sector leaders. Below t…