models
32 films tagged with “models”
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…
The Big Short
The film's opening gambit is also its thesis. It puts a quotation on the screen — it ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure that just ain't so — and then spends two hours demons…
Ex Machina
The Turing test, as it is actually deployed in Ex Machina, does not test the machine. It tests the man administering it. Caleb has been brought in to determine whether Ava possesses genuine consciousness, and the whole a…
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…
The Imitation Game
The machine works on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday the problem has changed completely. For months the Bletchley team has been consumed by a single question: can they build a device that tests Enigma configurations fast eno…
Margin Call
The model worked. That is the film's first and most unsettling point, and it is easy to miss because every popular account of 2008 wants the models to have been wrong. The risk models at the bank were not badly built. Th…
Moneyball
Moneyball begins with a constraint rather than an insight, and that ordering is the whole reason the film is useful. Beane's description of his position — rich teams, poor teams, fifty feet of crap, and then Oakland — is…
Inside Job
Ferguson trained as a mathematician and ran a software company before he made films, and Inside Job is built the way a systems engineer would build it: not as a story about greed but as a trace through a pipeline, follow…
Moon
Moon is an employment story. It is set on the far side of the Moon, it involves cloning and corporate conspiracy and a robot named GERTY who communicates partly through emoticons, but the structure underneath all of that…
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…
Zodiac
The film is structured as an investigation that refuses to converge, and the structure is the argument. Fincher begins with the murders — sudden, arbitrary, filmed with a flatness that drains them of the dramatic tension…
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…
The Fog of War
Robert McNamara was the first modern data-driven executive, and The Fog of War is the closest thing we have to a full accounting of what that identity costs. At Ford he was one of the whiz kids, the group of Air Force st…
Minority Report
The system works. This is established early, stated often, and never contradicted by the evidence within the film's own logic. The precogs see murders before they happen, and Pre-Crime intervenes, and for six years no on…
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…
The Matrix
The most useful thing about The Matrix is that the Matrix is not a villain. It is an optimisation. It runs correctly, it runs at scale, it delivers exactly what its operators need — a stable supply of power drawn from bo…
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…
Contact
The signal from Vega arrives as prime numbers, and the film is precise about why this matters. Primes are the one pattern that natural processes do not produce — no star, no pulsar, no geological formation generates a se…
Gattaca
Gattaca is the clearest film ever made about what happens when a proxy metric becomes the thing itself. The genome was meant to predict outcomes; by the time the film opens it has stopped predicting anything, because it…
Wag the Dog
Two weeks before a presidential election, a fixer named Conrad Brean is brought in to manage a crisis: the President has been caught in a sexual indiscretion, and the story is about to break. Brean's solution is not to d…
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…
WarGames
The break-in that starts the catastrophe is not a break-in. David is looking for an unreleased video game, finds an undocumented dial-up number, and is greeted by a prompt: shall we play a game? — followed by a menu that…
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…
The Parallax View
Pakula's conspiracy trilogy — Klute, The Parallax View, All the President's Men — moves from a crime with a single victim to a crime against the republic, and the middle film is the one that looks at the mechanism. Where…
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 Manchurian Candidate
The most disturbing scene in The Manchurian Candidate is not the brainwashing sequence in Manchuria, where American soldiers sit in a hotel garden listening to a lecture on hydrangeas while in reality being demonstrated…
Rope
Brandon kills David Kentley not because he hates him or profits from his death but because he has a theory. The theory holds that certain superior individuals exist beyond conventional morality, and that the act of murde…