The Mandela Effect (2019)

Memory isn’t particularly reliable.  Witness testimony is considered the least-reliable form of evidence.  How many people get facts wrong?  You can have ten people tell the same story ten different ways.  This makes it surprising that people will sometimes misremember something the same way.  Take, for instance, the Monopoly man.  Lots of people swear that he has a monocle when he doesn’t or that Curious George has a tail which doesn’t exist.  This is the basis for The Mandela Effect, a phenomenon that takes its name from the fact that people seem to think that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s.

The movie starts with parents Brendan and Claire at the beach with their daughter, Sam.  She goes down by the ocean and follows her stuffed Curious George doll (with a tail) into the water.  Cut to the grieving parents.  Claire is able to move past Sam’s death relatively well, but Brendan becomes obsessed.  He starts noticing details that don’t match up, like a photo that he thinks was taken somewhere else.

This leads him to Dr. Roland Fuchs, who has theories similar to Brendan.  Roland thinks that the universe is a computer simulation, much like the Matrix.  He proposes an idea.  Roland has access to a quantum computer.  If they can use it to run the right program, maybe they can crash the simulation, or at least get some cracks to show.

Two things happen.  One, Sam works her way back into reality.  Brendan is overjoyed, but Claire starts to lose it.  On a subconscious level, she knows it’s wrong.  The second is that Roland is removed from reality.  When Brendan goes back to visit, Roland has suddenly be dead two weeks.  This means that Brendan is on his own.

The movie is somewhere between The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor, only without the metaphysical depth.  Both of those movies took a harder look at what it meant to be in a simulation.  What was real?  What was fake?  Did it even matter?  This is more about Brendan not really being paranoid.

Even the disappearance of Roland and the reappearance of Sam are glossed over.  If Roland was dead for two months, than who or what did Brendan speak to?  What does it mean to be sentient or alive?  For that matter, why is Brendan the only one to be fully conscious of what’s going on?

The movie takes a psychological phenomenon and runs with it, but not very far.  The actual Mandela effect is relatively easy to explain.  Something like changing the Berenstain Bears to Berenstein is understandable.  Stein is a relatively common ending to surnames.  It would make sense that a lot of people would make that mistake.  Even thinking that the peanut butter brand is Jiffy is easy.  There is a word ‘jiffy’ and a brand called Skippy.  This doesn’t mean that there are parallel universes or computer simulations.

I will admit that it’s an interesting idea.  What if we live in a simulation?  It’s not even clear if the simulation is trying to protect itself or if there’s a higher power at work.  You might think that ambiguity might be nice.  Who needs all the answers?  I didn’t even feel like the movie went that route.  We’re not left with an ending that could go either way.  It felt more like the movie had an ending if for no other reason that we had to have an ending.  Brendan had to do something to resolve the story, so that’s what happened.  There was a lot of wasted potential here.

IMDb page

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

There are certain aspects of a movie that may seem cliché, but often prove necessary.  For instance, you should probably have a protagonist and an antagonist, each clearly defined.  At least one of the characters should learn something.  There should also be three acts; basically, there should be a setup, a story, and a resolution.  Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri doesn’t seem to follow these rules.

We have a protagonist in Mildred, who rents the titular billboards near her home.  Mildred’s daughter, Anne, was raped and murdered and the case is still unsolved.  Mildred uses the billboards to call out the town’s police chief, Willoughby.  Willoughby visits Mildred and reminds her that the case is cold.  None of the DNA matched anything from any other case.  There were no witnesses.  Without a random confession, the case is stalled.

That’s not enough for Mildred, who wants justice, or at least answers.  She’s committed to keeping the billboards up for a full year, despite not knowing where she’s going to get the money.  (She has enough for the deposit, but it takes an anonymous donation to keep it going for the first month.)  As you might expect, the town turns against her.  She can’t even trust her dentist.

You might ask where this is going.  I’ve seen the entire movie and I’m still asking that question.  Without giving out details, the movie meanders.  There are all sorts of major twists and turns, each taking the movie in a new direction.  We quickly learn that there are no sympathetic characters.  Given enough time, almost everyone seems to prove unlikable.  (There are maybe two exceptions to this observation, and one had very little screen time.)

Part of this is that the characters don’t seem to learn anything.  Mildred has had seven months to process her daughter’s death.  Taking out the billboards seems like the kind of impulsive thing someone might do the first month.  We even have Officer Dixon, who gets fired and is still the same racist person back when he had a job.  There’s no enlightenment.  There’s no new information or big revelation.  The movie ends with nearly every character basically the same person they were when the movie started.

This is one of those movies that I had seen because I have Moviepass.  Had I not seen it, I don’t think I would have seen it.  I’m not even sure I could recommend going if someone else paid for it.  It’s going to take me a while to process it and it might make sense if someone explains it to me.  Absent that, it would take repeated viewings and that’s not going to happen.  It has a rating of 8.5 on IMDb right now, so someone liked the movie.  I’m just not sure I can understand the movie.

IMDb page