unintended consequences
5 films tagged with “unintended consequences”
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…