I'm very impressed. It's like a cross between Billy Wilder and Rene Laloux, but with brilliant ideas incorporated from a Stanislav Lem novel. It works well as a drama, a science fiction movie, and a satire. This movie has serious edge and it deserves a wider audience. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but this is as heady and transporting as cinematic sci-fi gets.
shareOnly it really doesn't work as sci-fi. Where are people's actual physical bodies when they "cross over"? From the perspective of the doctor, for instance: does Robin disappear right in front of him when she takes the ampule? If so, where did all the matter that her body was made of go? And before that, when she "came back" thanks to that tooth thing: where did those raggedy clothes come from that she was wearing?
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Of course she doesn't disappear, do you think if you take a psychedelic drug your body disappears from the third dimension?
shareI agree that what you are saying makes sense if they portrayed it that way (as it was more in the story). But for instance, when she jumped in her car and gunned it past the "checkpoint" and everything goes animated, what happens to her actual car and what keeps her from getting in an accident? Where are their raggedy clothes coming from? Why do they talk as though people who "cross over" are really gone from the physical realm? No one is ever shown "in real life" acting as though they can see things that aren't there.
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It's an analogy for the fact we're all experiencing this reality thinking it's solid and real, when really it's all in the mind. The brain decodes vibrations and constructs a 3D simulation, if you take something like DMT you experience higher vibratory dimensions where your 3-dimensional body no longer exists. The Congress is a stylistic and surreal take on it and our Illuminati-dominated culture (notice the great big eye symbol in the film?).
shareThe brain decodes vibrations and constructs a 3D simulation, if you take something like DMT you experience higher vibratory dimensions where your 3-dimensional body no longer exists.
String theory states there are 11 dimensions, then look at quantum mechanics, then ponder what dark matter is and remember that gravity is weaker than the other forces.
shareShe could have been sitting in a chair and making vroom sounds -- not in an actual car.
shareSo she didn't arrive at the border to the "park" or whatever in a car?
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They never disappeared. No one ever disappeared. When she pops the pill, she just starts looking at everything like in a cartoon (wild, colorful, imaginative). Remember by the end she took the pill again, she chose to "become" her son (because you can become whoever you want), she then came back to the doctor B (her son's doctor) AS HER SON, she took another pill (not sure why, maybe to bring to her son?), and then she went back, and being her own son she found him in the fields... flying a kite... I find this movie emotionally, shockingly beautiful, discovering some deeper truths... That you can find who you love even in a world of fakery only if you become them. That's the only way to find them.
Genius.
And once again, yep: they're all there, in the body and dirty clothes, they just hallucinate stuff. They're probably being fed by others (the people in the chem suites), but when you get fed in the hallucinatory state you're probably imagining you're having that self-cooking lobster or a sparkling cocktail.
So basically everyone is physically in the same place (Earth, in the future), but one part of the population is perpetually addicted to psychedelics, while the others are keeping themselves sober. And so...
bingo, that's exactly what's happening in the real world. not sure how people are not understanding this. despite their hallucinations and alter egos, people are just wandering around and looked after by employees of the company and those who chose to remain sober.
shareI seem to be alone in this view but I took it that the 'real' Robin died in her 60s just before the Porsche scene.
After that it was entirely the imaginings of the 'scanned' Robin.