There are too many interesting movies in the world to talk about. Which, is why I attempted my first Blitzkrieg walk through the other day. It still ended up over 2,000 words. So, apparently, I don’t know how to Blitzkrieg anything. But I’m going to give it a shot anyway. So, yeah, let’s do a Blitzkrieg Anti Matter movie walkthrough, shall we?
The movie centers around a group of three scientists who may have just figured out how to wormhole matter from one location to the other. Like all other movies in this genre, (like my recent review of Alpha Gateway, or movies like Primer, Flatliners, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and The OA…) all deal with human experiments going various levels of pear shaped. That is the school of thought Anti Matter comes from.
Where Anti Matter sort of goes wrong in my mind is just how derivative the movie is. It’s as if some friends decided to do a remake of the 12 Monkeys, and left out the more ambitious time traveling business. Right? But the rest of it is all there. The animal masked protesters. The Police closing in. The ambitious science, and the conundrums the science causes. All there. But for all of its derivativeness, I still found the film to have some fairly clever bits that I enjoyed tearing apart in my mind as I attempted to grasp what was happening on the screen. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, watch it through this link to Amazon, and help support THiNC. as we continue to try to bring you interesting movies to discuss.
High Level Anti Matter Overview
If you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t go any further. You’ve been warned! So yeah, we’ve got three scientists who are working together on an accidental discovery one of them has made that appears to have opened up a wormhole. Ana, (played by Yaiza Figueroa), the lead scientist, is the one whose experiment found the discovery. And Liv, the hacker computer scientist, and Nate (played by Tom Barber-Duffy) – the love interest scientist? – join in to help scale this experiment larger and larger. Only problem? The experiment requires gigaflops of computing power to manage. More than the entire university is capable of. And so the researchers create a worm that will steal processing power from computers around the world. This ultimately puts the police onto them when the worm is discovered and shutdown.
But before the worm is shutdown, the trio manage to pull off a scaled test large enough to teleport a human. Because, of course they do. But after Ana phases from one location, three feet further into the room, she wakes up to find herself in bed.
Complicated Physics Movies Biggest Rule
Look. There are a pile of important rules when it comes to physics movie rules (particularly time travel movies). But the biggest, I MEAN THE BIGGEST, rule of them all, should have alarmed you immediately as to what was happening here in this movie. (I’d list like 10 other movie examples, but I really don’t want to inadvertently spoil all ten). When Ana began to get harassed by someone wearing a monkey mask? You should have IMMEDIATELY assumed that this was another copy of Ana. Like, IMMEDIATELY. I pegged it even before the experiment that that was going to happen, because of the people protesting in the streets wearing masks. I was like, oh, but I thought this was a wormhole movie, not a time travel movie. Huh. Guess they are going to have a double then anyway!
So yeah, not to let the “surprise” twist out of the bag early, but yeah, Ana Prime and Ana Secunde (or Ana1 and Ana2) are now released in the world. But we are not aware that from the moment the experiment happens, we are stuck following around Anna Secunde. Or, our “soulless” Ana. She is disoriented. She can’t remember things. She is doing research to figure out why she has these memory problems, and terrible dreams. She forces herself to stay awake. And she has run ins with the protesters, her mother, and the police (generally in that order). But things get way too weird for Ana, her mother says she called already, but she can’t remember. The maintenance crew says she got a key to the closet in their lab, but she can’t remember it. But that’s only because there are two of them, and Ana Prime has taken to living in the lab’s closet, while Ana Secunde is trying to make sense of the chaos of her life. But that’s only because she doesn’t actually exist.
The Final Twist of Anti Matter Explained
But really? All of that is just a distraction from the ultimate reveal of Anti Matter. Which, despite all the science, and the efforts to explain the curve away, is impossible to logically follow. Not that I care too much. It’s just something we have to willingly suspend disbelief and move forward with it.
The twist? So, when Ana blacks out, and wakes up on her bed the next morning, or some time later? That is simply because she isn’t Ana anymore. The experiment had to parts. The first, attempt was any jumping a few feet. But the wormhole closed too late, and messed up the data gathering they were doing. K? So, we learn, that they decide to do it over again in order to get a clean dataset. But when they do, this time? We get two Ana’s. Sort of. The team posits that light was left behind, or some non-soul residue of Ana was left behind as a result. And this is who had been running about the movie for the last hour plus.
It is this light/residue substance that has obviously been having memory issues. It is this Ana substance who was confused about the experiments and the details of what it was they were working on. And it was this Ana2, that Ana1 was hiding from in the closet of the lab.
Final Thoughts on Anti Matter Explained
I don’t know about you, but I saw the duplicate coming. But I didn’t understand how their experiment would have done such a thing. Which, is interesting, because they really didn’t either. The fudged science explanation of what happened in the wormhole made less than zero sense to me. They’d have done better to not try and explain it, honestly. “You know what guys, in the white paper, we should write: “We duplicated one of our lab partners… reasons? Absolutely no idea whatsoever. I guess when you mess with technologies you don’t understand, sometimes you get results you don’t understand.” and be done with it. But let me take a swipe at what the screenplay author, Keir Burrows, probably thought happened.
Anti Matter Theory #1 The Starfish
Alright, remember the scale that Ana2 found? The goal of the scale was to inform them as to when to close the wormhole. After all, the mass is what they were waiting to move before the hole closed. Only problem is, that when Ana1 begin to teleport her mass across the room, the wormhole closed before the totality of Ana1 was gone, leaving behind Ana2 in her wake. It’s as if I take every other pixel out of a photo, I’d have two almost whole photos, but neither would be complete. No? When you split a starfish in two, what do you get? Two starfishes. (Starfishi? Starfisheses? Whatever. Oh, CY, our illustrious editor as informed me that, “third-person singular present should be starfishes” so there you have it. We just learned so much!) And that is what happened here. Not sure exactly about the science, but the result is the same.
Anti Matter Theory #2 Zombie Automaton
Here, I’m just going to give you a couple of data points, and then we’ll try and sum them up into my Zombie theory… ok? I’m mainly going to rely on Ana2‘s conversation with the woman at the library for this: “Does human memory have mass? If you could wipe a person’s memory, would their brain weigh less? And memory is electricity, but electricity is electrons, and electrons have mass! And do you think we are more than our memories? I mean we’re born with none, and die with a lifetime’s worth, so, when we talk about the idea of a soul, maybe we’re just talking about…”
So what if, when the did the second test, they managed to decapitate the soul from Ana1? And it would have to be Ana1, because her matter pushed through the wormhole, and the portal hammered shut behind her, leaving behind the ‘memories,’ and the soul that made Ana1 Ana. Does that make sense? The only reason this theory could be legit, is because we don’t interact with Ana1 much at all after the experiment. We don’t see if Ana1 still has her memories intact. For this theory to work she’d have to be a roaming mental zombie really. But it helps to explain why their reversing the process is so important at the end. Not just because they are stuck with two Ana’s. But because they had one stuck in a closet that is basically useless to the planet.
Anti Matter Theory #3 Morality Test
What if the movie is simply a litmus test of morality – a what if – played out across a hundred minutes? Think about it. What would someone be, devoid of their soul? Would they be Jeffry Dahmer? Or, would it be more like a careless, thoughtless individual, with problems with memory?
There are a number of data points throughout the movie that give us some interesting things to discuss. The cassette tape? The peanut test with the cop? The A/B test of Ana1 and Ana2 and their mother? The Ana interactions with the animal protestors? Ana1‘s worry about her things at her mother’s house, and Ana2‘s complete disregard for “stuff”.
Basically, the theory is this… what if the movie is actually positing that souls matter in ways that you don’t realize. Usually, we connect them to church steeples and prayer books, but what if they matter more for what makes us who we are, and maybe that stuff is more intrinsic, and more important than we realize? I personally don’t agree with this view of the soul, so I’m having a hard time articulating what it is that Keir Burrows might be saying.
Final Thoughts on Anti Matter
First. Please don’t compare this movie to Primer and we will all be the better for it. Also. Don’t compare it to 12 Monkeys either. Or Coherence. Or a number of other movies that Anti Matter has hewn so closely to. Anti Matter has made an interesting attempt at a philosophical discussion about what makes us who we are. Do we mainly consist of electrical impulses that have little, or no weight? And even if there is weight to these impulses, are we just the sum of our experiences and little more? I personally think the conjecture here is completely wrong, but it posits an intriguing conversation about the possibilities none the less. What were your thoughts about the movie. Was it worth the time? Did you see other theories that might explain the larger goal of the movie overall?
Edited by CY
