SPOILER WARNING: This post, after a brief spoiler-free review section, will contain full spoilers for Oppenheimer, Barbie and Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One, and some for Across the Spiderverse.
How on earth do you get the idea that Oppenheimer said the nuclear bomb was a tragedy? It presents its building as a race against the Nazis doing the same, and everyone agrees they are bad. It also portrays the Soviets as a real danger, and there’s no indication that Oppenheimer’s arms control schemes could have worked. The movie presented international politics as tragic, which requires more than pie in the sky thinking and that one be hardheaded about bad governments in the world.
Of these movies I've only seen Barbie and I don't know if it's exactly a good movie but it is very interesting. I think it's good art because people can see so many different things when they watch this movie. This movie can say all kind of things depending on how you watch it.
Having said that, I hated the 'how hard it is to be a woman' speech. We live in the easiest time, in the easiest country that humans have ever lived and you're whining about it? Shut up.
"Where you can absolutely cut down on are the nudity and love interests."
No. Even setting aside my prurient interests, I think Nolan did something quite smart with the way he depicted Oppenheimer's interpersonal relationships and their cost to him and others. If anything, I think the movie made a mistake not mentioning his indiscretion with Linus Pauling's wife and the resulting fallout (pun unintended).
I agree that The Entity is given a degree of power to predict that is overblown in the movie, but disagree with your interpretation of the ending.
I think the friendly interpretation is that The Entity _cannot fully predict the IMF_, because the IMF _is nearly-disconnected from the graph of nation-state activities_ it was trained on. The Entity is indeed powerful, but incomplete and not yet scaling to AGI Lovecraftian excess; it still has vulnerabilities and demonstrably still requires human proxies. Even when The Entity predicts events, it predicts imperfectly when people who are in the shadows are involved, roughly in proportion to how in the shadows they are, and indicates that multiple outcomes are possible.
Heck, the Entity runs a whole mission with the goal of just collecting some basic data on Benjy's _motivations_.
So why does Ethan pull off the magic trick successfully? Because The Entity genuinely was unaware that it was within his capabilities, because canonically Ethan _only uses that skill on missions where Ethan has gone black already._ The movie emphasizes that even The Dread Pirate Rob...I mean, the DNI is unaware of the IMF and has no direct contact protocol for the teams other than devices that self-destruct, so presumably they're not within any of the files that The Entity has access to, either.
Ethan Hunt is a hole in the graph, inferrable only by the ragged edges he leaves in the data. The Entity doesn't have enough data to fully predict Ethan, or the insanely dumb things he'll do to try to win -- all it knows is that universes where it appoints Gabriel as one of its proxies, and intentionally trawls Gabriel through arms dealer nightclubs, has a better P_win for The Entity than all the other universes. (Because, we as the audience know, Ethan hates Gabriel and might slip up. The Entity doesn't care why that's the case).
I like this argument, but there are two problems with it.
1. The Entity is able to predict and manipulate the IMF, in several cases, in ways that this model says it shouldn't be able to.
2. The Entity multiple times has the ability to outright kill Ethan Hunt, if it chose to pick that mission. Why didn't it make a much better attempt at doing this? If he is truly the only real unknown, then killing him results in a provably winnable game state, so it should do that, no? Or at least take out his support staff, of which he only has like 3? Why use half measures?
Hmm; on #1, I'd honestly have to rewatch to be more clear.
On #2, I think the answer is that there are a few different instances where The Entity goes after an Ethan associate -- and in each of them, Ethan is thwarted from his tendency (established in previous movies! there is a surprising degree of characterization being brought back here!) to value his team's lives over his own -- and as a result doesn't die when he should have. In other words, the intent of several of these could have been to use Ethan's motivations to kill him _and_ his team, but his team (which would also be hard for The Entity to predict, also being IMF agents) thwarts it.
In the airport, Ethan would have been lured in by the bomb -- arguably, the questions make more sense for him than Benjy, as only Ethan can answer some of them -- but for his team _not telling him_ to keep Ethan on-task.
In the club/bridge fight, it's arguable that the _intent_ was to lure in Ethan -- to tell him that two members of his team are at risk, and that Gabriel will kill one of them. That causes him to move so fast in the chase he doesn't have time to realize the comms hacking, and causes him to fall into a trap that might have killed him -- the bridge is only the bait, Gabriel just follows through because he wants to hurt Ethan personally.
In the train fight, the intent is actually to use Ethan and Gabriel to take each other out -- The Entity has put them in a situation where Ethan's loyalty to his lost comrades should cause him to kill Gabriel for vengeance, thus (it seems) covering up the location of the Sevastopol right before the train gets blown up, but Ethan desists because of a previous Big Damn Speech by Luther given right before Luther goes totally off-grid.
But overall, yeah, I agree that some of this requires far more Rule of Cool handwaving than should be necessary -- you could easily have added a single line saying, "The Entity can't predict the IMF team, it can only predict Grace and Ilsa because they're not under the IMF's protections because Kittridge programmed it in to hide just the IMF from the DNI," and this solves basically the entire plot hole.
I like how you're thinking. I still think it takes a lot more work than that to fix the issue for real. It is similar to the key. If the key is 'real' in the sense that it is necessary for the solution, then the entity should simply have given Gabriel physical means to destroy one half of the key, which would have been easy to do. It didn't. With Hunt and the IMF, again if they are the one unpredictable element, then why not simply actually detonate the bomb and the whole airport, if it can't do better? What does it care? They get this right elsewhere in the film...
A more general objection here is that The Entity is acting like it has highly limited physical affordances and resources, when it essentially controls the internet and has leverage to get to any airgapped computer system, and can impersonate anyone in any electronic communication. It could easily eliminate all these ways for things to go wrong, if it wanted to.
"You can sometimes win battles, and you can impact the balance of power, there are better and worse powers, but you have to know power and that ultimately in all its forms it is your enemy, you have to fight, and you have to fight largely on their battlefield, and some form of power almost always wins the war. The details of how this works should be observed and remembered."
This is so close to a proper Continental post-modernist take, with all that implies (standpoint epistemology, most dramatically), that it hurts.
Wait, you can say Continental post-modern takes in ways that actually make sense? I am as surprised as you are. But why would something like that imply standpoint epistemology?
Re: "that ultimately in all its forms it is your enemy" This seems like an overreach. I'm certainly not a fan of concentrated power (governmental or corporate). Yet some limited forms of power, e.g. a judicial and law enforcement system capable of generally deterring murder, but not stepping too far beyond that role, seem to me to be generally a net gain for most of us, not only those that hold power.
On Barbie: The "hard to be a woman" speech bugged me too - it seemed so obviously a "hard to be HUMAN" speech that weirdly pretends to only be about women, plus the whole rant seemed tired, like it belonged to some distant earlier time. Like going to a comedy club and getting a long bit about not liking airline food. It only took a couple examples before I found myself saying: yeah, yeah, if you want to be maximally liked you do need to show ALL the positive traits IN MODERATION because having too MUCH of any positive trait can engender jealousy (plus it's a better signaling story to casually HAVE the trait than to have been conspicuously working hard to GET it), while having too LITTLE of a positive trait means you're not aspirational/admirable in that respect.
Too bad; that's humanity for you!
IF you want everyone to like you you'll want to thread that needle of being good but not truly outstanding in all positive traits...but another option is to GIVE UP on the goal of wanting almost everyone to like you and just be okay with knowing only SOME people will like you. There is nothing forcing women - or humans generally - to choose option A yet suffer mightily for falling short of the ideal; they could choose option B instead. Or they could choose A but acknowledge it's a hopelessly unrealistic goal so it's okay and expected to fall short!
Just came back from my Barbie watch. So much subtext was about rehabilitation of the Barbie brand for 2020's women. After every dialogue line about how hard it is to be a woman, the movie insists how hard it is for a corporate brand to be PC. As soon as you listen for this, you will be deafened, the dialogue is shouting it in your ear every minute. [Mattel itself is allowed to be evil; this is to deflect / contrast from the branding image of Barbie, which is being re-positioned to defuse feminist complaints]
which called the movie fascist is indeed a generally awful review and really doesn't deserve much credit, but got the closest of the linked materials to bringing up this take.
"Shut down the internet" was in the Battlestar Galactica's Overton window, they had laws and social norms against networking computers, maybe that's a show we need to generate a little renaissance for to get people to open up to the idea in case it's necessary. You can still have computers, and move data around on cool octagon disks!
How on earth do you get the idea that Oppenheimer said the nuclear bomb was a tragedy? It presents its building as a race against the Nazis doing the same, and everyone agrees they are bad. It also portrays the Soviets as a real danger, and there’s no indication that Oppenheimer’s arms control schemes could have worked. The movie presented international politics as tragic, which requires more than pie in the sky thinking and that one be hardheaded about bad governments in the world.
Of these movies I've only seen Barbie and I don't know if it's exactly a good movie but it is very interesting. I think it's good art because people can see so many different things when they watch this movie. This movie can say all kind of things depending on how you watch it.
Having said that, I hated the 'how hard it is to be a woman' speech. We live in the easiest time, in the easiest country that humans have ever lived and you're whining about it? Shut up.
"Where you can absolutely cut down on are the nudity and love interests."
No. Even setting aside my prurient interests, I think Nolan did something quite smart with the way he depicted Oppenheimer's interpersonal relationships and their cost to him and others. If anything, I think the movie made a mistake not mentioning his indiscretion with Linus Pauling's wife and the resulting fallout (pun unintended).
Don’t you wish you lived in the matriarchal Woketopia BarbieLand?
I kept hoping von Neumann would show up at Los Alamos to solve the symmetry problem og the implosion bomb.
I agree that The Entity is given a degree of power to predict that is overblown in the movie, but disagree with your interpretation of the ending.
I think the friendly interpretation is that The Entity _cannot fully predict the IMF_, because the IMF _is nearly-disconnected from the graph of nation-state activities_ it was trained on. The Entity is indeed powerful, but incomplete and not yet scaling to AGI Lovecraftian excess; it still has vulnerabilities and demonstrably still requires human proxies. Even when The Entity predicts events, it predicts imperfectly when people who are in the shadows are involved, roughly in proportion to how in the shadows they are, and indicates that multiple outcomes are possible.
Heck, the Entity runs a whole mission with the goal of just collecting some basic data on Benjy's _motivations_.
So why does Ethan pull off the magic trick successfully? Because The Entity genuinely was unaware that it was within his capabilities, because canonically Ethan _only uses that skill on missions where Ethan has gone black already._ The movie emphasizes that even The Dread Pirate Rob...I mean, the DNI is unaware of the IMF and has no direct contact protocol for the teams other than devices that self-destruct, so presumably they're not within any of the files that The Entity has access to, either.
Ethan Hunt is a hole in the graph, inferrable only by the ragged edges he leaves in the data. The Entity doesn't have enough data to fully predict Ethan, or the insanely dumb things he'll do to try to win -- all it knows is that universes where it appoints Gabriel as one of its proxies, and intentionally trawls Gabriel through arms dealer nightclubs, has a better P_win for The Entity than all the other universes. (Because, we as the audience know, Ethan hates Gabriel and might slip up. The Entity doesn't care why that's the case).
I like this argument, but there are two problems with it.
1. The Entity is able to predict and manipulate the IMF, in several cases, in ways that this model says it shouldn't be able to.
2. The Entity multiple times has the ability to outright kill Ethan Hunt, if it chose to pick that mission. Why didn't it make a much better attempt at doing this? If he is truly the only real unknown, then killing him results in a provably winnable game state, so it should do that, no? Or at least take out his support staff, of which he only has like 3? Why use half measures?
Hmm; on #1, I'd honestly have to rewatch to be more clear.
On #2, I think the answer is that there are a few different instances where The Entity goes after an Ethan associate -- and in each of them, Ethan is thwarted from his tendency (established in previous movies! there is a surprising degree of characterization being brought back here!) to value his team's lives over his own -- and as a result doesn't die when he should have. In other words, the intent of several of these could have been to use Ethan's motivations to kill him _and_ his team, but his team (which would also be hard for The Entity to predict, also being IMF agents) thwarts it.
In the airport, Ethan would have been lured in by the bomb -- arguably, the questions make more sense for him than Benjy, as only Ethan can answer some of them -- but for his team _not telling him_ to keep Ethan on-task.
In the club/bridge fight, it's arguable that the _intent_ was to lure in Ethan -- to tell him that two members of his team are at risk, and that Gabriel will kill one of them. That causes him to move so fast in the chase he doesn't have time to realize the comms hacking, and causes him to fall into a trap that might have killed him -- the bridge is only the bait, Gabriel just follows through because he wants to hurt Ethan personally.
In the train fight, the intent is actually to use Ethan and Gabriel to take each other out -- The Entity has put them in a situation where Ethan's loyalty to his lost comrades should cause him to kill Gabriel for vengeance, thus (it seems) covering up the location of the Sevastopol right before the train gets blown up, but Ethan desists because of a previous Big Damn Speech by Luther given right before Luther goes totally off-grid.
But overall, yeah, I agree that some of this requires far more Rule of Cool handwaving than should be necessary -- you could easily have added a single line saying, "The Entity can't predict the IMF team, it can only predict Grace and Ilsa because they're not under the IMF's protections because Kittridge programmed it in to hide just the IMF from the DNI," and this solves basically the entire plot hole.
I like how you're thinking. I still think it takes a lot more work than that to fix the issue for real. It is similar to the key. If the key is 'real' in the sense that it is necessary for the solution, then the entity should simply have given Gabriel physical means to destroy one half of the key, which would have been easy to do. It didn't. With Hunt and the IMF, again if they are the one unpredictable element, then why not simply actually detonate the bomb and the whole airport, if it can't do better? What does it care? They get this right elsewhere in the film...
A more general objection here is that The Entity is acting like it has highly limited physical affordances and resources, when it essentially controls the internet and has leverage to get to any airgapped computer system, and can impersonate anyone in any electronic communication. It could easily eliminate all these ways for things to go wrong, if it wanted to.
Great reviews but my favorite part was the Sumner reference.
"You can sometimes win battles, and you can impact the balance of power, there are better and worse powers, but you have to know power and that ultimately in all its forms it is your enemy, you have to fight, and you have to fight largely on their battlefield, and some form of power almost always wins the war. The details of how this works should be observed and remembered."
This is so close to a proper Continental post-modernist take, with all that implies (standpoint epistemology, most dramatically), that it hurts.
Wait, you can say Continental post-modern takes in ways that actually make sense? I am as surprised as you are. But why would something like that imply standpoint epistemology?
Re: "that ultimately in all its forms it is your enemy" This seems like an overreach. I'm certainly not a fan of concentrated power (governmental or corporate). Yet some limited forms of power, e.g. a judicial and law enforcement system capable of generally deterring murder, but not stepping too far beyond that role, seem to me to be generally a net gain for most of us, not only those that hold power.
They already kind of MADE a Rock 'em Sock 'em robots movie: Real Steel (2011).
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obYuPJH2oTE
On Barbie: The "hard to be a woman" speech bugged me too - it seemed so obviously a "hard to be HUMAN" speech that weirdly pretends to only be about women, plus the whole rant seemed tired, like it belonged to some distant earlier time. Like going to a comedy club and getting a long bit about not liking airline food. It only took a couple examples before I found myself saying: yeah, yeah, if you want to be maximally liked you do need to show ALL the positive traits IN MODERATION because having too MUCH of any positive trait can engender jealousy (plus it's a better signaling story to casually HAVE the trait than to have been conspicuously working hard to GET it), while having too LITTLE of a positive trait means you're not aspirational/admirable in that respect.
Too bad; that's humanity for you!
IF you want everyone to like you you'll want to thread that needle of being good but not truly outstanding in all positive traits...but another option is to GIVE UP on the goal of wanting almost everyone to like you and just be okay with knowing only SOME people will like you. There is nothing forcing women - or humans generally - to choose option A yet suffer mightily for falling short of the ideal; they could choose option B instead. Or they could choose A but acknowledge it's a hopelessly unrealistic goal so it's okay and expected to fall short!
Just came back from my Barbie watch. So much subtext was about rehabilitation of the Barbie brand for 2020's women. After every dialogue line about how hard it is to be a woman, the movie insists how hard it is for a corporate brand to be PC. As soon as you listen for this, you will be deafened, the dialogue is shouting it in your ear every minute. [Mattel itself is allowed to be evil; this is to deflect / contrast from the branding image of Barbie, which is being re-positioned to defuse feminist complaints]
I think this review of the ones Zvi linked (https://im1776.com/2023/07/27/barbie-review/)
which called the movie fascist is indeed a generally awful review and really doesn't deserve much credit, but got the closest of the linked materials to bringing up this take.
"Shut down the internet" was in the Battlestar Galactica's Overton window, they had laws and social norms against networking computers, maybe that's a show we need to generate a little renaissance for to get people to open up to the idea in case it's necessary. You can still have computers, and move data around on cool octagon disks!