Brainstorm
The door to the mind is open! Natalie Wood stars with Academy Award winners Christopher Walken, Louise Fletcher and Cliff Robertson in a riveting drama about a team of scientists who discover a way to travel…
Source: YouTube Movies
About the Movie
Scientists Michael Brace (Christopher Walken) and Lillian Reynolds (Louise Fletcher) have invented a headset that records human sensory experience — sight, sound, touch, emotion — and plays it back directly into another person’s mind. The demonstrations are wondrous: a rollercoaster you can feel, a meal you can taste. Their corporate and military backers immediately see a different product.
When Reynolds, overworked and chain-smoking, suffers a fatal heart attack, she has the presence of mind to record it — the first-ever recording of death itself. Brace becomes obsessed with playing the tape back: to learn whether something of the mind survives, and what she saw on the way. The military wants the device for interrogation and worse; Brace wants the answer to the oldest question there is, and is willing to die at half-speed to get it.
Why This Movie Matters to Sci-Fi
Brainstorm was director Douglas Trumbull’s attempt to invent a new kind of cinema — shifting aspect ratios and immersive techniques to simulate direct experience, a forerunner of today’s VR thinking, decades early. Its central concept, recording and sharing subjective experience, anticipates everything from brain-computer interfaces to social media’s memory economy, and the questions it asks about who owns an experience are more current now than in 1983. The film is also remembered with sadness as Natalie Wood’s final picture; she died during production, and the film was completed and dedicated to her.
