Mandela Effect, The |
USA • 2019 • 80m •
  • Directed by: David Guy Levy. • Starring: Charlie Hofheimer, Aleksa Palladino, Robin Lord Taylor, Clarke Peters, Madeleine McGraw, Tim Ransom, Ptolemy Slocum, Vernee Watson, Elena Campbell-Martinez, Steven Daniel Brun, Salme Geransar, Jonah Fuller. • Music by: Ohad Benchetrit, Justin Small.  The Mandela Effect follows a man who becomes obsessed with facts and events that have been collectively misremembered by thousands of people. Believing the phenomena to be the symptom of something much larger, his obsession eventually leads him to question reality itself.
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Review:
Excellent mind bending Sci-Fi which uses limited technical means expertly and puts big budget productions dealing with a similar subject matter (The Matrix) to shame.
The trailer features an Alan Watts (British Philosopher which created a unique cultural bridge between Western and Eastern Philosophy) audio lecture on the topic of perception and asking questions such as: How much of what is do we perceive? In what measure can we trust our senses? What is reality?
The movie features a family in a future altering moment of their lives. A momentary decision will change their reality forever. The father being a computer coder subsequently notices oddities in day to day life which chases him down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories (the Mandela effect) to uncover the "truth" behind reality itself.
However the movie is more than just the expertly crafted family thriller. It dares asking and also answering some of the deepest philosophical questions which current developments in technology (informatics and measuring devices such as the CERN particle accelerator etc) and theoretical physics are starting to grasp. The fact that what is "real" is so only in relation to an observer. If the observer isn't there, "reality" doesn't manifest. What happens if a tree falls in the forest? Does it make a sound or not if there isn't anyone to hear it? Of course it doesn't make a sound. Because sound is a relationship between the object making a sound (vibrations in the air) and the ear-drum hearing it. The ear evokes the reality of the falling tree. Existence is therefore RELATIONSHIP.
I enjoyed the movie immensely mostly because it challenges Western assumptions about the Universe, ourselves, our role (free will) and what is real and it opens a gate to questioning and perhaps uncovering some ancient wisdom along the way. Yes, we believe that we are on the brink of uncovering the "truths" of the World through technology. We are certain that we must. Because we want to control everything. But what if we are instead just going to uncover that we have ignored what our fore-fathers already understood. Indeed the binary language of computing is based on an ancient Chinese philosophical book called i Ching (The Book of Changes - Ying and Yang, Black and White, opposites secretly mutually revealing themselves). Which in turn is based on even older Buddhist (in turn an of-shoot of Hinduism, an even older philosophy) philosophy which gave birth to Taoism in China. And Buddhism is the one philosophy of Reality which is consistent with measuring techniques and calculations of modern physics. It opens up perception into a "reality" in which there is no outside observer (Us) but only experience as such arising from the relationship between observer and the observed. A non-dual eternal happening which is forever coming into being anew through vibration. Yes it is a "simulation". But not in the V.R. sense. It's a neurological experience. When we open our eyes we see what is in our brains. The "outside" World is created "inside" our brains and thus is ourselves. Which leaves Western man and his "exact World of calculus", in which he believed to be a center of thought and action, revealed as a hallucination. Because there isn't anything to hold on to for him. Not concepts. Not "real, tangible" things. No Creator Ruler of the Universe. No way to pin it all down (Although the movie suggests a creator and goes down the path where man can and does manage to "control" things in a minor way, if only by using a crafty lever. But these are the devices of western story-telling and they are used masterfully, here).
"Your MIND is all there is, everything", Alan Watts.
"If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism". Albert Einstein
P.S.: I believe Alan Watts should have a credit in this movie.
The trailer features an Alan Watts (British Philosopher which created a unique cultural bridge between Western and Eastern Philosophy) audio lecture on the topic of perception and asking questions such as: How much of what is do we perceive? In what measure can we trust our senses? What is reality?
The movie features a family in a future altering moment of their lives. A momentary decision will change their reality forever. The father being a computer coder subsequently notices oddities in day to day life which chases him down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories (the Mandela effect) to uncover the "truth" behind reality itself.
However the movie is more than just the expertly crafted family thriller. It dares asking and also answering some of the deepest philosophical questions which current developments in technology (informatics and measuring devices such as the CERN particle accelerator etc) and theoretical physics are starting to grasp. The fact that what is "real" is so only in relation to an observer. If the observer isn't there, "reality" doesn't manifest. What happens if a tree falls in the forest? Does it make a sound or not if there isn't anyone to hear it? Of course it doesn't make a sound. Because sound is a relationship between the object making a sound (vibrations in the air) and the ear-drum hearing it. The ear evokes the reality of the falling tree. Existence is therefore RELATIONSHIP.
I enjoyed the movie immensely mostly because it challenges Western assumptions about the Universe, ourselves, our role (free will) and what is real and it opens a gate to questioning and perhaps uncovering some ancient wisdom along the way. Yes, we believe that we are on the brink of uncovering the "truths" of the World through technology. We are certain that we must. Because we want to control everything. But what if we are instead just going to uncover that we have ignored what our fore-fathers already understood. Indeed the binary language of computing is based on an ancient Chinese philosophical book called i Ching (The Book of Changes - Ying and Yang, Black and White, opposites secretly mutually revealing themselves). Which in turn is based on even older Buddhist (in turn an of-shoot of Hinduism, an even older philosophy) philosophy which gave birth to Taoism in China. And Buddhism is the one philosophy of Reality which is consistent with measuring techniques and calculations of modern physics. It opens up perception into a "reality" in which there is no outside observer (Us) but only experience as such arising from the relationship between observer and the observed. A non-dual eternal happening which is forever coming into being anew through vibration. Yes it is a "simulation". But not in the V.R. sense. It's a neurological experience. When we open our eyes we see what is in our brains. The "outside" World is created "inside" our brains and thus is ourselves. Which leaves Western man and his "exact World of calculus", in which he believed to be a center of thought and action, revealed as a hallucination. Because there isn't anything to hold on to for him. Not concepts. Not "real, tangible" things. No Creator Ruler of the Universe. No way to pin it all down (Although the movie suggests a creator and goes down the path where man can and does manage to "control" things in a minor way, if only by using a crafty lever. But these are the devices of western story-telling and they are used masterfully, here).
"Your MIND is all there is, everything", Alan Watts.
"If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism". Albert Einstein
P.S.: I believe Alan Watts should have a credit in this movie.
Review by CarsonTrent from the Internet Movie Database.
Movie Database