Review of Limitless (2011)
Seen in 2021.
A disheveled man whose only hope is his contract for writing a book, which he is not competent to do, starts taking a drug that enhances his recall, perception and general intelligence.
The script dumbs down the novel it’s based on, The Dark Fields (2001), and even that book was a techno-thriller, not science fiction and not nearly as clever as “Understand” (1991). The makers of the film clearly struggle to illustrate hyperintelligence in the medium of film for a mass market. To their credit they come up with a couple of neat visual tricks, including vibrant colour grading and pulling back to fisheye to show how characters on the drug are able to process more of their impressions. However, rather than polishing the script, the main effort goes into hyperintelligence as a power fantasy, with sex, violent crime, dazzling conversation at glamorous cocktail parties (‽) and a lot of money, including poker and strangely emphasized day trading of stocks. At one point a hyperintelligent woman picks up an ice-skating child to wield as an improvised weapon, which is a kitschy thing for a hyperintelligent person to do. Art and science never come up, beyond the cheesy metafictional conceit that the main character’s book is The Dark Fields.
In the only real glimpse of science fiction, it is revealed near the end that a pharmaceutical corporation has been distributing the drug of the premise to junkies and others as a clinical trial, evidently without monitoring the results of this trial or controlling the spread of rumours about it, for the purpose of keeping it secret. That last bit is important, because—although it is internally contradicted by the lax methodology—wanting to keep the drug itself secret implies that somebody is smart enough to want to keep quiet about being smart, as smart people do in “Understand”. Developing this premise through worldbuilding would have been great, but instead, the writers posit that the main character becomes extra hyperintelligent forever and therefore invulnerable even to the makers of the drug, which gets no explanation whatsoever. It is the biggest plot hole of many that the main character himself never hides. I guess the writers thought that the vicarious power fantasy would have been less total if he had.