Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Personal relationship
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Personal relationship
Finding the distinction between appearance and reality is, and has always been, one of the principal focal points of philosophy. From Plato to Descartes, all philosophers have grappled with this problem (at one point or another); what is reality? While the question isn't exactly novel, the science fiction genre sort of picks up where the great philosophers left off in an attempt to answer, if not better understand, this question and ourselves. Works including Dark City (1998) and The Matrix (1999) have both pushed their audiences to think what is reality? Who am I and what does it mean to be human? While none of these works nor myself are so bold as to claim to have all the answers, the discussion is still worth delving into. Through an analysis of each film's theme of reality maybe we can learn something about what is real or something about ourselves and our humanity.
Alex Proyas' Dark City dives headlong into these inquiries in a few different fashions. The film begins with John Murdoch naked in a bathtub confused and suffering from amnesia. Although Murdoch is an adult this can very easily be seen as an allegory for birth. I don't want to say a rebirth necessarily because Murdoch doesn't remember who he used to be but a birth nonetheless. From this point on, Murdoch is essentially trying to figure out the reality of his identity. Not the easiest of tasks considering the altered reality he is in. Murdoch is lost, confused, and struggling to understand his situation. Without his memories he seems to be quite broken as a person.
Which brings us to the idea of memory being reality. Dark city poses the questions is our reality a collection of our memories? Do our memories make us human? Murdoch who has suffered amnesia and gain...
... middle of paper ...
...that doesn't negate the fact that you are still thinking. This in turn allows us to believe that as we think, we exist. This I would imagine is the goal of the protagonists in the Matrix. To get people to realize that they do exist and that the truth is a good in and of itself. To be secure in our concept of reality and our sense of self.
To conclude it seems I asked a great deal more questions than I answered, if any. Reality, as it were, doesn't seem to be the easiest thing to discuss. While the irony in that is palpable I believe there is value in probing these types of questions. Films like Dark City and The Matrix give us a playground to bounce ideas back and forth and their premises have a strong impact on our own identity and sense of reality. These films then while not being "real" themselves give us the opportunity to ask ourselves what is "real" anyway?
Let me briefly explain a simplified plot of The Matrix. The story centers around a computer-generated world that has been created to hide the truth from humans. In this world people are kept in slavery without their knowledge. This world is designed to simulate the peak of human civilization which had been destroyed by nuclear war. The majority of the world's population is oblivious to the fact that their world is digital rather than real, and they continue living out their daily lives without questioning their reality. The main character, Neo, is a matrix-bound human who knows that something is not right with the world he lives in, and is eager to learn the truth. He is offered the truth from a character named Morpheus, who proclaims that Neo is “the One” (chosen one) who will eventually destroy the Matrix, thereby setting the humans “free.” For this to happen, Neo must first overcome the Sentient Program agents who can jump into anyone's digital body. They are the Gate Keepers and hold the keys to The Matrix.
As a conclusion, it must be said that the generic marker ‘The visual surface of Science Fiction presents us with a confrontation between those images to which we respond as “alien” and those we know to be familiar’ can be applied to Blade Runner when judging the movie from an aesthetic point of view as well as from an ideological point of view. As it was mentioned earlier in the essay, the film is constructed from images which society nowadays find as alien (such as images of the city, interiors and social interactions) and also from more familiar images
In the Matrix, the concept of the illusion of reality is constantly portrayed. Mr. Anderson was once an average citizen living the “normal” life, paying taxes. But as he is faced with the realization that the world which he has known his life was not real, he has to make a decision whether to live in his dream world or to become unplugged from the “Matrix” and to begin his journey with the role to become the “one”. Throughout the movie, Neo becomes more and more detached from the world he once knew. He starts developing skills with the guide of Morpheus which allows him to reach his full potential. The dialogue from Morpheus “What is real?” appeals and makes the audience think about the statement. It implies how do you know what is or isn’t real. In “The lady in the red dress” scene, everyone is walking straight, not looking where they are walking thus symbolizing that they are totally unaware of the situation that they are being held as captives. However, the woman dressed in red is moving around freely lookin...
For the common moviegoer and book aficionado, the movie, The Matrix and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are bizarre and peculiar. These works are not the usual themes of normal movies and books. These works have a lot of elements in common. Both works have matrices. The movie and the book stress the idea of reality. In both works the idea of what s real and what s not is the central theme.
...tands the test of time, thanks only to its screenplay; the effects, score and sets can all be outdated, but a good script will never date until dealt with. Many of the influential screenplays, hence films, have risen from the sci-fi genre and they will undoubtedly continue to do so as long as the genre keeps re-inventing itself visually. This is something the Wachowski bros have done; they’ve started a new chapter in the history of cinema and sci-fi, one which has already spawned the likes of ‘Pitch Black’ ( Ian Thorburn and David N. Twohy , 2000), ‘Minority Report’ ( Steven Spielberg , 2002) and of course, the next two Matrix sequels.
The movie "Matrix" is drawn from an image created almost twenty-four hundred years ago by the greek philosopher, Plato in his work, ''Allegory of the Cave''.The Matrix is a 1999 American-Australian film written and directed by the Wachowski brothers. Plato, the creator of the Allegory of the Cave was a famous philosopher who was taught by the father of philosophy Socrates. Plato was explaining the perciption of reality from others views to his disciple Aristotle. The Matrix and the Allegory of the Cave share a simmilar relationship where both views the perciption of reality, but the Matrix is a revised modern perciption of the cave. In this comparison essay I am going to explain the similarities and deifferences that the Matrix and The Allegory of the Cave shares.In the Matrix, the main character,Neo,is trapped in a false reality created by AI (artificial intelligence), where as in Plato's Allegory of the Cave a prisoner is able to grasp the reality of the cave and the real life. One can see many similarities and differences in the film and the allegory. The most important similarity was between the film and the Allegory is the perception of reality.Another simmilarity that the movie Matrix and the Allegory of the Cave shares is that both Neo and the Freed man are prisoners to a system. The most important difference was that Neo never actually lived and experienced anything, but the freed man actually lived and experinced life.
The Matrix, once being released was a world-famous film that involved a lot of thinking and the ability to interpret complex ideas. However, these two topics of fate and freewill were creatively and smartly submerged in this film. The pill, jujitsu and Oracle scene were three main examples of the effect this all had on The Matrix, however there were a few others scattered throughout the film. It remained to be quite a mysterious concept but gradually as more in-depth thoughts came to mind, it seemed to be quite interesting. By exploring these themes it forces us to think if we are in a Matrix and what are reaction would be like if we were to find out that the world we lived in was a fake, never our true reality.
"BR: In every sense we create our own reality, and this goes much further than most people aware of or are willing to admit. The reason most people can't see this is because everyone is creating their own reality, but 99.9% of them are creating the same one-using
It has been stated that the application of memory functions in fictional works which act as a reflective device of human experience. (Lavenne, et al. 2005: 1). I intend to discuss the role of memory and recollection in Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian science-fiction novel Never Let Me Go (2005).
Imagine living through life completely bound and facing a reality that doesn’t even exist. The prisoners in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” are blind from true reality as well as the people in the movie “The Matrix” written and directed by the Wachowski brothers. They are given false images and they accept what their senses are telling them, and they believe what they are experiencing is all that really exists. Plato the ancient Greek philosopher wrote “The Allegory of the Cave”, to explain the process of enlightenment and what true reality may be. In the movie “The Matrix”, Neo (the main character) was born into a world of illusions called the matrix. His true reality is being controlled by the puppet- handlers called the machines who use the human body as a source of energy. In the movie, Neo, finds and alternate reality and he has to go on a journey to discover himself and what is around him. Much like “The Allegory of the Cave” the prisoners in a dark underground cave, who are chained to the wall, have a view of reality solely based upon this limited view of the cave which is but a poor copy of the real world. Both the prisoners of the cave, and Neo from the Matrix, have to transcend on the path of ‘enlightenment’ to know the truth of their own worlds.
The first issue that needs to be addressed however is what exactly is memory? “ Without memory we would be servants of the moment, with nothing but our innate reflexes to help us deal with the world. There would be no language, no art, no science, no culture. Civilization itself is the distillation of human memory” (Blakemore 1988). The simple interpretation of Blakemore’s theory on what memory is that a person’s memory is at least one of the most important things in their life and without it civilization itself could not exist.
Memory is defined as “the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information” (“Tmesis”, n.d.). Memory is purely mental. Everyone has memories, either pleasant or unpleasant, but they are still there. They are an essential part of who we are and without them, we would struggle to establish our identity. Memory is not only images of the past, but emotions too. They are the main reason a memory is either stored or forgotten.
From time to time, the reader hears of a red light in the house of 124 Bluestone Road. Sethe is haunted by a life changing choice she made in her past. Her daughter's infant ghost haunts the house that Sethe and her daughter, Denver occupy. Sethe cannot move forward in her life because of a choice she made many years ago, which was to kill her baby girl. This decision was based upon the fact that Sethe did not want her daughter to be taken back into slavery. Sethe tries to repress the past, but cannot with this ghost haunting her. Paul D. proceeds to enters Sethe's life again, and as a result he causes more negative memories to resurface. He brings back the memories of Sweet Home, the plantation where they were slaves together. Sethe recalls Sweet Home and states, "Comes back whether we want it to or not" (Morrison 16). This statement reflects the meaning that no matter how hard someone tries, memories cannot be repressed forever, they will resurface at some point whether the person wants them to or not. When Paul D. arrives at her house, the memories from Sweet Home resurface, which in this instances is a very deconstructive matte...
The film combines many different types of cinematography to make these scenes come to life and add suspense. The mise-en-scene being used in the film creates a totally different aspect in the film. The Matrix also used many different special effects on the characters and the scene to make the film so spectacular in every way. The special effects used made the viewers truly believe that the film is a realistic action movie. Many people do not realize the role these types of cinematography play in a film until they actually pay close attention to every scene. Different lighting and color techniques help to set the mood for the film and cause suspense for the