DrGonzo

As someone who's mother's maiden-name is Sokol I found this move extra offensive and disturbing...

What I couldn't wrap my head around with this movie is how a company that produces what's arguably the most boring and mundane piece of hardware (cd-rom players), and does a bad job of it at that, is also able to produce a fully functioning VR environment, which requires hardware and software about a thousand times more complex, but their main selling point remains those lousy cd-rom players?! Hell, just drop those players altogether and focus on the VR-system, which seems to be advanced even in today's standards! And maybe use it for something else other than as an inconvenient filing cabinet?

SO many things in this movie did not have a payback it goes beyond red-herring to just plain incompetent screenwriting and/or making. To name just a few: The cigarettes left next to multiple crime-scenes; The medicine given by Mathias to HH; The pictures HH took of his (future) victims; HH meeting Mathias on the train (PS. That train takes about 8 hours to arrive from Oslo to Bergen and there's a flight that takes one hour...); Val Kilmer's whole sub-plot (including why he was killed); JK Simmons' whole sub-plot; The creepy "pregnancy doctor" and his relation to JK Simmons; Why Mathias targeted the people he did, and how his work as a physician was related to it; etc. etc. This movie has more (poorly constructed) misdirects than plot, it seems. Beautiful photography, though, especially in the beginning and during the train ride.

The way they refer to the bar ("We'll be at Chumley's ordering copious amounts of drinks on this paper") it seems like it's their regular spot for after-work drinks, so that's not that strange...

Great show about a not-so-great movie! But I do feel that two very important parts of it were not discussed at all: The fore-shadowing and "post"-shadowing (if you can call it that). The fore-shadowing was the eye scan the movie started with just before Ro entered the Senator's office, which is of course connected to the big "breakthrough" Miles has later on with the enlarged images of the diluted eyes on the wall at the office. The opening (and closing) credits were actually displayed on top of stylized versions of this scan, too. The "post"-shadowing happens during the very last seconds of the film, where it seems that someone saw Ro killing Miles from a window across the street, suggesting the cycle of blackmail might not be closed, after all, or maybe that Ro won't get away with her crimes. I actually had to go back and try and figure out if this person was shown before, but no, just some random dude. Weird way to end a weird movie.

I have a note and a question about this one. I see that storage space was already discussed in detail, but how about internet bandwidth? According to Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth, the average user's bandwidth grows by 50% per year, and this has been going on consistently since at least 1983. In 2018 that speed was 300 Mbps (megabits per second), which means that in 2021 (when the movie takes place), it should be around 1 Gbps. That's download speed. Upload speed is typically around 10% of that, so 100 Mbps, which translates to 12.5 Megabytes/s. Now, the PharmaKom boys have 320 Gigabytes to transfer. It should take around 7 hours to transfer all their data online at that projected speed. Surely, that is much easier than uploading the data to a human courier's head, with all the risks involved, and then putting him on a plane and sending him to the destination? Just the flight from Beijing to Newark would take around double that time... Now, to my question (spoiler alert!): The big reveal at the end of the podcast was that the "ghost in the machine", Anna, was actually Johnny's mother. I did not get that at all... Nor do I understand how did people arrive to this conclusion. It doesn't seem to be mentioned by anyone in the movie itself (or did I miss it? I kind of zoned-out by the end), and all I could find was a 2-seconds clip in the last flashback where the camera pans upwards towards Johnny's mother, but she doesn't look anything like the profile picture of Anna Kalmann, the founder of PharmaKon. Am I missing something here? Here are the two screenshots I took of these women: Anna Kalmann's profile photo Johnny's mother's from a weird angle EDIT: Sorry, I made a mistake in my calculation. It's actually 7 hours, not one minute, as I originally wrote. I think it's still easier, faster, cheaper and more reliable to transfer the data online than inside some guy's head.

I didn't attack or "name called" anyone. I just expressed my displeasure at the episode. If that's not allowed what's the point of having a forum at all?

My previous reply was deleted from the forums, so I guess negative opinions are not welcome here... Wow.

My biggest qualm with the plot (well, one of many) was when Dr. Preston Pickett (Ph.D.) refused to use "Bobby's gift to make a dishonest quick buck", but he was perfectly fine with using his "powers" for an extended period of time to solve fender-benders and other idiotic crimes, for a lousy 10% fee. So I guess somehow having him tell them the lottery numbers and making them instantaneous millionaires (at no one's expense) was way worse then putting his life in danger chasing kidnappers, or strapping him to the hood of a car (why couldn't he give instructions from the back seat?!), or having him blow up buildings or kidnap an entire airplane and drive it through the streets of Boston...

YAY!

Great minds do math alike...

Omission: Towards the end of the movie when they communicate with a ship that has picked up their "distress beacon" the ship tells them they are 4 parsecs away and that it will take them 45 minutes to get to them. That blew my mind so I did some math. A parsec maybe doesn't sound like much but it's a huge distance, equal to 3.26 light-years (the distance it takes light to travel in space during 1 YEAR). So 4 parsecs is 13.04 LY, or 6,853,824 Light Minutes (the distance light travels in a minute). In other words, this ship is more than 150,000 times faster than light! First of all, that's impossible according to the currently-known laws of physics. Second of all, even if they did discover some way to travel faster than light in this future, how come it took them so long to arrive to the base? Unless it was halfway across the galaxy it should have taken them nanoseconds to arrive there. [Edit: forgot some words]

Yeah, it seems to be self-aware of its weirdness, which makes it even more weird, to be honest...

imdb Just watched this movie, and holy shit, is it bonkers... It has everything: Aliens, shadowy government organizations, Evangelical priests, white punks, black musicians, repo men, supernatural cars, Emilio Estevez... I can't even begin to describe the plot. It's absolutely worth a HDTGM episode, IMO.

Let's not forget "cleavage explosives" (for lack of a better term), which were kept there for 25 minutes (in movie-time), before being used to save the day!