DVD: Limitless
Neil Burger’s stylish directing and good acting from Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro can’t quite redeem the plotting choices in Limitless—which are the fault either of the screenwriter, or whichever executive mugged the screenwriter to get him to make the changes. The picture starts out with an interesting premise. Cooper is a wannabe novelist who can’t get his life together. After his girlfriend dumps him, he bumps into his ex-wife’s dealer brother. Takes a pill that enhances his intelligence. All cool, original stuff… different characters… must’ve come out of the novel by Alan Glynn (I’m guessing; I haven’t read it).
But after that… well, all Cooper really does with his big brain is make more money and get more girls. Sure, that’s what you’d start out with, but I bet that would get dull after a while. Plus I bet you’d get corrupted and start making some bigger and badder choices.
But the script never goes there and you can almost hear the script conference meetings: we don’t want the hero to become unlikeable… we don’t want to offend… there could be some really cool fight scenes…
As a result, while the picture is watchable, it’s small and full of missed chances. Plus I’d like to know about a couple of major plot points the resolutions of which seem to have ended up on the cutting room floor.
You won’t be bored watching this. Then you’ll forget it ever happened.
I think that the movie owes a long-range debt to Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes. But the most immediate debt seems to be to Understand, a brilliant novelette by Ted Chiang:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang
The man has been writing for more than 20 years, yet has only one collection of stories out, Stories of Your Life and Others, comprised of a dozen stories. He values quality over quantity, and every story of his is a finely cut and polished gem. Most of them win, or at least are nominated for, Hugos or Nebulas or both.
If you are a speculative fiction aficionado, Chiang’s collection is one of three recent ones (within the past decade or so) that you impoverish yourself by not having read. The other two are Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, and Tales for the Long Rains by Kij Johnson.
Older speculative fiction story collections I can heartily recommend are Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison and San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories by Tom Reamy.
If you prefer novels, Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and Reamy’s Blind Voices are remarkable works. The Windup Girl won both the Hugo and the Nebula.
There are wiki entries on all these authors, including lists of Hugos and Nebulas they have won.