介绍:
Legend has it that we humans are using only ten percent of our brains. This old myth has created a myriad of fantasies, and one of the most recent is the movie Limitless.
Faced with the grim hold of "writer's block", young author Eddie is about to hit the bottom of his life, even his girlfriend is walking out on him. But his downward momentum is suddenly reversed by the acquisition of a bag of magic pills that help him tap the full potential of his brain. After finishing the whole book in four days, Eddie conceives an audacious plan for the future. But in order to get there, he has to make careful use of every precious pill in his secret stash to deal with the side effects, and the gangsters who would kill for his miracle pills.
The cinematography and visual effects are the best part of this piece. To mark the distinction between the ordinary Eddie and the super Eddie with drug effects, the movie presents two versions of the world. With the ordinary Eddie, everything seems black-and-white, dark and gloomy; whereas with the drug-enhanced Eddie, everything is extraordinarily bright and colorful, implying that a man with superior brain capacity would possess sharper senses.
Bradley Cooper's rendering of the main character Eddie further enhances this distinction. The ordinary Eddie is a stuttering dumb writer with a lousy haircut, while the smart Eddie is a sober Wall-Street upstart radiant with confidence and glamour. Of course the extra lights and colors must have helped with the trick, but Cooper also did an excellent job in his portrayal of the character.
This distinction provides a fairly good beginning for the movie, but as the plot develops, things start to disappoint. You would expect someone with a four-digit IQ to find real smart solutions to his problems, but no, the director decides to add a little drama to it. And in most American movies, that either means sex, violence or failed attempts at tugging on the heart-strings. So in this case, violence is the most pertinent and dramatic solution the smart guy could come up with. Why not? Smart guys all appreciate the merit of simplicity.
The director must been so much engrossed in portraying and applauding the benefits of superior intelligence to realize that the story is too loosely organized. Narration is brought in to fill the loopholes, but the viewers can still sense the unusual pace that gathers in the lead-up to the hasty ending. Of course this could have been avoided, if the director had access to Eddie's magic pills.
There is still one more thing that bothers me. By taking the magic pills, Eddie has practically cheated the game of life. But by the end of the movie, he has done away with the gangsters and the side effects, and is running for president. Even a powerful man who has found out his secret was powerless to stop him. Yep, being super smart is just so invincible.
It takes a dreamer to appreciate the ending, which unfortunately I am not. So as a practical man with average intelligence, I could only give this movie a SIX.
By the way, research has shown that we do use 100 percent of our brain in our everyday life, so limitless power with super intelligence is indeed a beautiful dream.
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