Serenity 2019 - Was the Twist Unrealistic?

-Spoiler Warning-

Serenity was released in January of 2019, it was directed by Steven Knight and stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Jason Clarke.

Synopsis

Baker (Matthew McConaughey) works as a fishing boat captain on a small island. One day his ex-wife (Anne Hathaway) suddenly shows up and asks him for help. She wants him to kill her violent husband (Jason Clarke), who is harassing her and her son. The plan is to take him on a fishing tour and throw him overboard and leave him with the sharks. In exchange she promises him $10 million dollar.

It's not like it seems

Lets talk about the twist right away because there is no way to review this movie without talking about it.

At first everything looked like we would get a pretty usual thriller, where the protagonist has to kill a really nasty guy, in order to save his former lover. You would expect this kind of movie to end with them falling in love again, or possibly a twist in the form of a betrayal, but this movie went a completely different route.

As soon as Anne Hathaway shows up the dialogue got so cheesy that I had to laugh out loud and I knew that something was off, it felt like it was actually intentional. Later we see Matthew McConaughey jump into the water while the camera was rotating around him like in a third-person video game.

A bit later we find out that it is exactly that, a video game that his son programmed by himself. Baker was actually killed in Iraq many years ago and his son created his character based on a childhood memory, where they were fishing together. In reality the son's mother got remarried to an abusive man and he uses this game to distract himself from this desperate situation.

Was it all intentional?

Many critics said that the performances were horrible and that it was cringe worthy, but after knowing what the movie is actually about, it kind of makes sense that the dialogue was so cheesy. After all, it was programmed by a young boy. (Which is a bit shocking, if you consider that he programmed his parents to have sex together ehm...)

That's why I think all of the actors actually did a good job, it was supposed to be this way, even if it may be off-putting for a lot of people. I think the cheesiness and over the top dialogue was actually pretty entertaining and made for a few good laughs.

Does the twist make sense?

The twist was certainly a bold choice, but does it make any sense? There are a lot of arguments against it.

• Could a young boy possibly program all of it alone?

Right off the bat, I would say it sounds absolutely impossible that a single boy could create such a realistic artificial world, no matter how smart he is, but what if it was set in the future?

We have games like The Sims now, where we can create our own little world in no time. Of course it is not very advanced, but imagine what could be possible in 20 years or more.

Artificial intelligence will make it super easy to create hyper realistic worlds much bigger than the one in the movie. Eventually there will be computer generated worlds that are as big as our planet and there will be various tools that make it easier for new programmers and even a single person could be able to create something very impressive.

• How could the game characters develop their own consciousness?

This also makes a lot more sense if the movie was set in the future. To use The Sims as an example again, all the Sims we create follow simple patterns, but of course they are not able to think for themselves.

In the future this could change though. One of the smartest guys on earth, Elon Musk, actually said that there is an extremely high chance that we are living in a simulation right now. There is no way for us to tell if we live in the real world or not.

It's a scary thing to think about, but something like this could be possible with really advanced technology. If there is an A.I. that is able to learn by itself and experience feelings, it could also develop its own consciousness.

• He didn't have access to the real memory of his father

Since the boy couldn't transfer the actual mind of his father into the game, we can assume that it is just an A.I. he created based on a few of his fathers memories. He won't be able to see his real father again, but he still finds comfort in this other version.

• How did he load up his mind into the game world at the end?

In the future it could be possible to actually load up your mind on a server and exist forever in the artificial world. He could have even scanned his father before, if this technology existed.

Another possibility would be something like The Matrix, where you jump into the game with your mind and are able to wake up again in the real world later. I'm pretty sure that there will be games like that one day.

Is it set in the future though?

I think the biggest fault of the movie is that it doesn't seem to be set in the future, at least it doesn't look like it. The movie also doesn't mention it, if I remember correctly.

The room of the boy and especially his computer monitor certainly didn't seem very futuristic.

That's too bad because it seems completely unrealistic in a present-day setting and this problem could have been easily avoided by giving the boy's room a more futuristic look. Black Mirror is doing stuff like that all the time, so it can't be that difficult.

Bottom line

Serenity was an unusual movie with a bold twist and I really appreciate that. The setting made it seem very unrealistic though and there were some pacing issues and points about the story that could have been improved. I still like that it was different though and I hope that there will be more movies that take risks, even if it doesn't always work perfectly.