MovieChat Forums > Flatland (2007) Discussion > the philosophy of this movie is totally ...

the philosophy of this movie is totally wrong!


In the movie, everything is move along the plane.So question, where is the gravity from?
If the universe is 2D, then planets have to be circles, and people have to move along the circumference. In that case, the floor of house must be a line, not plane as we saw in the movie.

So this movie is misleading, and I will give it a 1/10 without doubt.

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Well, genius, if you want to nit-pick then you are completely wrong.

Flat land is a 2D realm that is resting on the 3D realm and therefore is completely feasable.

The plane is 3D and it is what supports the entire 2D structure. If this were not the case, Flatland would have sunk into nothingness or simply floated away.

Therefore I give your intelligence a 0/10.

This is a movie based on a thinking mans book, go back to forums that are more on your mental level....I reccommend Juno.

I shaved your moms back

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Well, if you'd like to perceive the movie as a fairy tale, then I'd like to perceive the 0/10 as your innocence, and there is no need to wonder why you enjoy it so much. Good for you though.

Oh, BTW, if i told you that the Superman is capable of being pregnant, and he saved the world with his pregnancy, would you like the story? I don't like it actually, because the Superman cannot be pregnant. Am i being nit-picking?

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I prove you suck at mathematics and you tell me Superman can be pregnant? What's next? My dad can beat up your dad?

Go to college if you want a debate with me, son. I recommend reading the novella and come back with facts, not assumptions that can be blown out of the water by a 6th grade Algebra student.

I couldn't think as slow as you if I tried

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Pretty sure English isn't that galen87 guy's first language, his argument has to be one of the weirdest i've ever heard in my life.

Either that or he's a genius who loves to confuse the hell out of people, because he sure had me scratching my head there for a while.

Pregnant Superman?...........Anyone?

Oh and BTW my dad can definitely beat up your dad.......no question. ;)

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I saw no gravity in the 2D world

no water flowing
no doors swinging
no buildings falling

Where was the movement generated by gravity that you had issue with ?


visit http://www.search.co.tt

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You can achive many 2d views, top, bottom, left, right... Each of them is unique, for example you play mario or worms its side view or you play M.a.x its top view they are both 2d but with different perspective, look at pictures

http://blog.hartwork.org/__images/super_mario_war.png
http://www.gamegoldies.org/old_game_files/2008/02/m.a.x.-building-tanks-strategy-game.jpg

:P
__________________
This is junk don't read

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We can classify dimensions into two types: horizontal and vertical. Living as we do on the surface of the earth, we have two horizontal dimensions, and one vertical dimension. When you design 2D world, you can copy our 3D world but you have to sacrifice one dimension. You can either sacrifice a horizontal dimension, resulting in an Egyptian-painting style world. In that case the floor would be a line. Alternatively you can sacrifice the vertical dimension. In that case, there would be no gravity, and the floor would be a plane.

Flatland uses a mix of these two possibilities. The Flatland environment is basically like ours but without the vertical dimension. The people in Flatland are missing a horizontal dimension.

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In the book, the living beings and objects were supposed to have minimal thickness and glide around over the surface, that fluxuating blue background seen in the film.

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This movie supposes a universe in which there exist only 2 dimensions... this is pretty different from our universe... so why not imagine a universe without gravity?

If there were gravity, how would it work? Well, it would work a lot like it does in three dimensions or four dimensions or however many dimensions you are in. Even if there are no planets, there is still GRAVITY, as all objects with mass generate a gravitational field. So suppose in flatland there just isn't anything very massive. In that case, there would be no need for the characters to be pulled toward anything.

Here are some better questions:
How do they move?
Is there a sun? How do they get energy?
Does gravity seep in from higher dimensions? If it does, why wouldn't it seep into our universe?

In the end, I will just say this:

Willing suspension of disbelief.

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I first read Abbott's novella in high school, many, many years ago. The premise of the book was so intriguing to me that I read it over and over. To this day, I still remember exactly where I was sitting in our school's library when I was reading it. It had such a profound impact.

What intrigued me, however, was not comparisons between second and third dimensional worlds, but in comparisons between third and fourth dimensional worlds. The idea that a fourth dimension could exist.

Just as you move from no dimensions, a point; to one dimension, a line; to two dimensions, a square; to three dimensions, a cube; . . . .and just as incredulous as it is, for a "being" in each of these various dimensional worlds, to even consider that another dimension, beyond what they "know", might exist . . . . I wonder if we kid ourselves by believing that there are "no" additional dimensions beyond what we "know" , , ,

Absolute truth is an objective reality that exists independent of what anyone thinks or feels about it.

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There is in fact a fourth dimension. It's called "time". =P

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Actually, I was speaking of a spatial dimension . .. "In the spatial sense, the fourth dimension is a space with literally 4 spatial dimensions, or four mutually orthogonal directions of movement. This space, known as 4-dimensional Euclidean space, is the space used by mathematicians when studying geometric objects such as 4-dimensional polytopes. It is not to be confused with the Minkowskian notion of time being the fourth dimension." from Wikipedia.

It is quite possible that there are many more dimensions than we as humans can possibly imagine. Certain mathematicians have attempted to draw analogies to help us understand a fourth dimension .. case in point, the tesseract . . .

Absolute truth is an objective reality that exists totally independent of what anyone thinks or feels about it.

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Hmm, I liked the story (both book and movie) largely due to it's having one pervasive theme. One. One theme. Just one. And yes, women being needle shapes who are treated as second or third class citizens, while unfortunate for those characters, *is* relevant to the theme of the book. The very same theme that drives all of the math and extra-dimensionality.

Abbot was not simply teaching advanced geometry here. He did a great job of that, but — like most popular science fiction — that is primarily an allegory to help provide perspective on certain kinds of social inequality. The problem directly being addressed is that of Victorian class hierarchy and social myopia. Socially, (regardless of dimension) these beings are "locked" into a world view they cannot "see" their way out of. In this world view, beings are considered socially acceptable if and only if they are isosceles triangles or near-perfect polygons. Anyone shaped differently are considered abominations or monsters. The movie strays from that slightly but the book drives the point home sternly. Furthermore, those with a greater number of equal sides and angles (approaching practical circularity) are considered to be wiser for some reason (probably due to breeding, as normally polygons gain a side in each generation). Women are seen as inferior due to a social snowball effect beginning with their weaker physiology. Sound familiar?

I hear plenty of people complain about the misogynism inherent in the original work, who obviously don't understand the main theme. This part of the story employs "hostile ideology", much like Jonathon Swift isn't really a cannibal and Stephen Colbert isn't really a republican.

So the idea is to paint this landscape with exaggerated social ills (and curiously lacking a vertical spatial dimension), and then instead of tackling the social ills directly which would merely offend people in 19th century society, he attacks the missing dimension itself which is both an interesting, and a socially benign academic argument. He figures, if a two dimensional being can discover a third dimension and learn to understand it's nature through sheer analogy alone, and the viewer can follow along on this quest, then the viewer might allow their own imagination to take flight to envision a fourth dimension above our own.. which is also fully comprehensible via mathematics and analogy, though we do honestly lack empirical, measurable evidence of what it would be like. EG, you can't just run down to Wal-Mart and buy a genuine Hypercube to study. You have to infer everything about it's nature via mathematics and visual projection.

The viewer is left with this challenge due to A Square trying to explain this next leap to the Sphere and being stubbornly rebuffed. The viewer puts on the shoes of the unexpectedly obtuse Sphere who started the epiphany to begin with, and are thus invited to break out of their own limitations.

And FINALLY, the viewer is encouraged by the sheer magnitude of injustice present in the story to see the roots of the pattern of oppression inherent within Flatland — and how such ignorance can be rendered in any number of dimensions — then to compare that with their own Victorian environment. Lacking in depth, lacking in dimension.. trying to teach a person steeped in tradition that what they are doing is either limiting or even harmful to society is just as frustrating as trying to teach anyone from 1000 AD that the Earth is not flat. You WILL be viewed by most as either a forgettable whackjob, or a dangerous heretic.

It is a fact pervasive of every culture I have studied, past or present, that the general public will collude to suspend certain liberties, much like "flattening" the space in which one may move, in order to avoid unknown and unspeakable threats they prefer to trust companies and governments to protect them from. Such behavior invariably leads to taboo, censorship, and the corruption of power unchecked by a populace who would rather not consider the existence of freedoms employed and then abused by the very people sworn to uphold the strictures. In this movie, President Circle commits mass murder: a crime most flatlanders would consider inconceivable for a being with so many perfectly formed edges. He hides his crime by blaming radical foreign insurgents nobody cares to understand the motives of. He wins doubly by this action. He liquidates the senate, and blames the massacre on his scapegoat enemy. Thus he magnifies his own power via public belief in a maxim by secretly violating that very maxim. Beautiful in it's poetic irony yet grisly in the caution it advises us.

Such social conventions, "prisons you cannot see or smell or taste or touch" are fairly simple to erect in a culture given that once a populace has learned to move through a flat space via complicated ritual, the freedom of an extra dimension of movement becomes terrifying to consider. To that end, any discussion on the matter becomes intolerable, and the assumption goes that none would discuss such "forbidden" freedoms who do not secretly desire greater capacity to abuse them.

In Victorian times, this covered all facets of social etiquette. Cast inequality, gender inequality, racial inequality.. We have since shed much of this ignorant behavior, but we have not yet (and may never) complete such a journey of enlightenment. It is easy for us to look back to the time this book was written as a sphere might look down upon a pitiful flat space, and gloat that our freedoms today are now complete.

However, as A Square might even point out to you, our journey is certainly not finished. The dangerous thing about lacking a dimension is that you cannot easily determine that you are even being limited. You can move in every direction you can see, and you cannot (or reflexively choose not to) see any directions which are closed to you.

Let us consider Gay Marriage as an example, since it is a hot-button topic of the moment. So long as you "define" marriage as needing to involve a man and a woman, you limit your own freedoms (regardless of whether you would ever choose to exercise them) as well as the freedoms of others (who may find such strictures significantly more chafing than you do). So long as you cling to this definition, you cannot see that you are missing anything. Certainly, before the Gay Rights movement any marriage with a "configuration" different than that of one husband and one wife (biblical polygamy notwithstanding) was seen as either ridiculous or an abomination. Anyone who wished to even discuss such an idea was considered either a pervert, a deviant, or perhaps mad.. and you invariably distrusted their motives. Today, it's mostly religious conservatives that still resist the legal endorsement of such arrangements. I suppose they are concerned that once homosexual couples are done fighting for this freedom, they may next move the trenches up to something more genuinely threatening to the religious establishment.

There are countless other examples I will not touch upon here for fear of bristling too many hairs at once (Nudists? Recreational Drug Users? I could do this all day) but one of my favorite Victorian-like, unfair, over complicated, over litigious conventions that is going through it's noisy death throws though no one will publicly admit they want to see it die is Copyright Law.

Hey, settle down! There is no use defending copyright to me on the IMDB boards. This is a topic whose very discussion might get you banned from a forum which gets it's revenue from the very agencies who prefer you know as little as possible about the matter. Because, you see, corporate abuse of copyright law *is* systemic, draconian, and leads to censorship unlike simple Gay Marriage.

Any time an abolitionist speaks out, big content producers need say nothing because an army of alarmed, small or would-be content producers rally to their defense asking stubborn and rhetorical questions like "how will content creators make money?" They don't really want an answer, just to try to make our proposals sound silly. To us this sounds exactly like "Where is this 'up' you speak of? It isn't a direction I can travel in so I call you a liar". Well, I'm sorry, that direction will be challenging for you to comprehend or travel in until after we've released ourselves from the shackles of content monopoly. I could simply name alternatives such as Assurance Contracts or Canned Media as Advertisement for Live Performance, but the people I talk to always try to compare these methods with under-performing or niche experiments already attempted in the copyright-hampered world we live in today, which is much like confusing "up" with "north" and thus arriving at foundationally flawed conclusions.

They also love to bemoan the inevitable loss of movie productions with quarter of a billion dollar price tags. Helpfully, the cost of production drops by magnitudes once you do not have to pay for every second of film and audio to be pristinely and utterly original and hire a team of attorneys to ensure that nobody could somehow interfere with your work by laying claims to any portion of it. It is also needlessly hard to make a buck via honest means in a market distorted by the power of corporations which control every classical content channel (radio, television, Hulu) providing whole copies of their content for free and then charging usurious sums to allow people to view the content again under their own control (for example offline, on their own schedule, or without ads) to say nothing of citing content in an accessible manner or remixing it into your own work.

People tend to demand content that they have either seen before, that their friends have seen, or that is advertised to them to wet their whistles. So long as all such material is copyrighted, the funds gained from fleecing the public to see these canned performances are then re-invested in saturation-marketing the next wave of imaginary property and starting the cycle anew. As a result, today a vast majority of all digital information in the world is under some form of copyright or another, and any access to or use of it is controlled by oftentimes unreachable authors (or more commonly the production houses they've sold out to) whose only commercial interest in allowing you access lies in gouging from you every penny they can get.

When some roads and bridges have tollbooths, you weigh the added convenience of the shortcut against it's cost and drive the long way around if the convenient path is not within your budget. When every road paved has it's own toll booth, all trips become astronomically expensive so you simply stay home or only travel along paths herded by those who control the fees of important routes (such as to or from their own artificially overpriced shopping malls!)

Copyright holders will normally agree to no sum whatsoever (or sums neither you nor they could ever amass in your lifetimes) if you request permission to include their work within your own. This is especially when your enveloping project is intended to be consumed (!) redistributed (!!) or remixed (!!!) freely to encourage wide distribution. This leaves liberal creators no options besides creating or commissioning every molecule of a new work from scratch, and this leaves virtually all human knowledge and parable unavailable to include in situ within discussion. For example, I could not embed a video clip from Flatland the Film on my blog to illustrate a tricky point I intend to make without risking my blog hosting and/or my Youtube channel in the process. Even when it's fair use, I'd have to invest in a court case to defend my blog entry.

So, yes, I had to open a whole can of worms to illustrate an unpopular position regarding copyright. My point is that describing gender equality or interracial marriage so that a Victorian can comprehend it's relevance without tripping over personal offense is as difficult and exhausting as one of many modern day equivalent arguments (such as copyright abolition), which in turn is as challenging as understanding 4 dimensions when all you can perceive are three.

For every action there is an equal and opposite merchandising opportunity

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