systems failure
28 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…