systems failure
35 films tagged with “systems failure”
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…
Snowpiercer
The train is a closed system, and Bong Joon-ho organises his film as a traversal of it. Curtis Everett starts in the tail section — dark, cramped, fed on gelatinous protein bars whose ingredients nobody asks about — and…
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…
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…
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…
WALL-E
The first thirty minutes of WALL-E contain almost no dialogue and constitute one of the most precise depictions of work ever put on film. A small robot wakes up, charges his solar panels, puts on his treads, and goes to…
Michael Clayton
Michael Clayton opens with a monologue spoken into darkness — Arthur Edens, the firm's lead litigator on a massive agrochemical class action, dictating an ecstatic, unravelling brief that sounds like a man simultaneously…
Idiocracy
Idiocracy is remembered as a film about stupid people, which is the least interesting thing in it and probably why the film is quoted more often than it is understood. The narration frames the premise as a selection stor…
Primer
Two engineers build something in a garage and then lose track of what it does. That is the whole of Primer, and it is also the reason the film has a reputation for being impossible to follow. The unintelligibility is not…
Memories of Murder
The central drama of Memories of Murder is not the murderer. It is the epistemology of the detectives. Detective Park Doo-man, the local investigator, works by intuition and coercion: he reads faces, trusts gut feeling,…
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…
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Kubrick developed A.I. for decades before passing it to Spielberg, and the film bears the marks of two incompatible sensibilities trying to share a single argument. That tension is, accidentally, its greatest asset for t…
Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade
Jin-Roh is structured around a question that never gets asked aloud: who is using whom? Kazuki Fuse, the elite trooper at the film's centre, believes himself to be acting from feeling — guilt over a girl's death, attachm…
Apollo 13
The most instructive thing about the line everyone remembers is how little drama is in it. Houston, we have a problem, delivered in the cadence of a status report, immediately followed by a systems reading — main bus B u…
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…
Sneakers
The MacGuffin in Sneakers is a small black box that decrypts everything. Plug it into the Federal Reserve and the accounts open. Plug it into air traffic control and the system is legible. Plug it into the power grid, mi…
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…
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…
The China Syndrome
The China Syndrome is built around a single structural irony: the people best positioned to know whether a nuclear plant is safe are precisely the people with the most to lose from saying it is not. Jack Godell (Jack Lem…
Logan's Run
The city works. That is the first thing the film establishes and the thing it never lets you forget. Nobody in the domed city of 2274 is hungry, cold, lonely, or bored. Pleasure is universally available and friction has…
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
McMurphy arrives at the institution expecting a system he can game. He is a convict, not a patient — he got himself transferred from a prison farm on the theory that a mental hospital would be softer — and he reads the w…
Chinatown
The mystery in Chinatown is solved completely, and the solving changes nothing. Jake Gittes identifies the crime — the diversion of public water to destroy the agricultural value of the San Fernando Valley so that land c…
Dark Star
The crew of the Dark Star has been in space for twenty years, and it is important to understand what that means in organisational terms. Nobody has been fired, nobody has been promoted, nobody has received new instructio…
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…
Soylent Green
The film's most famous line is its least interesting element. Everyone knows the reveal — Soylent Green is made out of people — and the sentence has entered the language as shorthand for a terrible secret, but the secret…
A Clockwork Orange
The Ludovico technique does exactly what it promises. Alex is conditioned to associate violence with unbearable nausea, and after two weeks of treatment he cannot raise a hand against another person without collapsing. T…
Z
The opening title card is the film's first structural claim, and it deserves to be read as one. Most films based on real events assure the audience that any resemblance to actual persons is coincidental. Z reverses the f…
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…
Dr. Strangelove
The Doomsday Machine is the purest argument ever staged about automated systems, and it is worth being precise about what the argument actually is. The device works by removing human judgement from the decision to retali…
Fail Safe
Fail Safe arrived in 1964, the same year as Dr. Strangelove, treating the same source material — a mechanical error that sends nuclear bombers past the point of no return — and asking the same structural question: what h…
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…
Mon Oncle
The Villa Arpel is a machine for demonstrating status. Every element of it — the fish-shaped fountain activated only when guests arrive, the garage door that opens before the car has stopped, the kitchen that runs itself…
Paths of Glory
The attack on the Anthill is ordered by General Mireau, who initially refuses the mission as impossible and then accepts it within sixty seconds of learning that a promotion accompanies success. This is not a scene about…
Stray Dog
Kurosawa made Stray Dog in 1949, four years into the American occupation, and the film is saturated with the specific texture of that moment: a city still half-rubble, a generation of young men who came back from the war…
All Quiet on the Western Front
The schoolmaster Kantorek stands at the front of his classroom and delivers a speech about duty, honour, and the fatherland. His students — boys, essentially, seventeen and eighteen years old — are moved to volunteer for…