An imaginable masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (24 September 2010)

When I learned about quantum mechanics, parallel worlds, string theory, black holes and so on , I thought to myself "If someone can put these ideas to their fullest in a movie, that'd be great . But as an avid reader of scientific books myself feels so hard to understand all the theories and ideas at a normal person's level and not a scientist's level, how can we make a movie without oversimplifying the ideas to the point that they lost their true meanings? ". But I did imagine that something like this exists. Just by total accident, I was dragged out to see Mr. Nobody without reading anything about it before hand and I was glad that I didn't. The movie has everything my imagination asks for and more. Well, I think other comments have all the necessary praises so I don't need to add more, my vote says it all. However when I came across some of the negative comments I did sympathize with them because there were times when I would react like that as well, so I may try to point out some of the things that this movie is not:
1. It's not a movie for people who don't even grasp the basic concepts like spacetime and how it operates in "A brief history of time"
2. It's not really for people who don't understand why a particle can be at different places at the same time. Why if we shoot a particle at something, it can both hit the target and not hit the target, why both events can happen in microscopic world but never such 2 contradicting events manifest simultaneously in everyday world.
3. It's worse for people who already understand 1 and 2, but then become ignorant enough to think that that's all there is to it. or to think that this is Butterfly effect + Benjamin , because it's totally not.
Because Professor Leonard Susskind of Stanford has explained that we can have conflicting stories true in macroscopic world (note that this is different from point number 2), for instance "The postman delivered the mail to the mail box and leave. the home owner then retrieve the mail" and "The postman didn't deliver the mail and leave with it" are both true, as long as the postman and the home owner never gets together to compare their stories. Susskind then used similar idea to explain the Blackhole paradox by Stephen Hawking.
4. And no, it's not 3 possible lives, because it's a much bigger number than 3, but I don't mean infinite because we can certainly prove that the number of choices in what ever duration we're talking here (120 years?) is a finite number. And secondly it's not "possible", it's "already happened". The lives that the main character have all already happened, not imagined, they were all true, as the old man recalled, some of them lead to his death , but he's certainly not dead, how? Simple, time runs backward for him, so it's not normal causal effect. All that matters is he is there at the time when time runs backward, BIG CRUNCH whatever. The 9 year old boy can make a choice (mom, dad, no choice) but time will run back to him, maybe simultaneously from all the alternate lives or universes for that matter. but whatever he sees have already happened even his multiple deaths , the point is normal people in any universe won't be aware of that, he's special and he's the only one aware of the consequences of the choices he made , but in the end that won't matter either, time will run back to that 9-year old boy decision making point as well. This can be confusing, maybe it's easier using the String theory to explain.
5. As for the 'true love' part, I don't see much point in it. There are a lot better romantic movies with more practical and beautiful love plot so using love as a selling point for this movie may gain understandable negative effects from some reviewers.