![]() ![]() (L-R) DIRECTOR NEIL BURGER AND BRADLEY COOPER ON THE SET OF LIMITLESS. I was looking for something bigger to roll into really quickly, something that had a kind of crazy energy, which this movie definitely does. Leslie and Scott Kroopf, who’s the producer, sent it to me, and I liked it. ![]() ![]() How did that happen? Well, they came to me after I finished The Lucky Ones. And this film, Limitless, is from Leslie Dixon’s screenplay. You’ve made three films as a writer-director. By deftly handling these ideas within the confines of a wide-release (2,500 screens) thriller, Burger continues to create, as he did in The Illusionist, an accessible mainstream picture that, like his protagonist, is a notch smarter than the rest. (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” was the question Nicholas Carr asked in a 2008 essay in The Atlantic.) So I found Limitless’ proposal that the gigabytes of information that wash over us daily are not just digital noise, numbing us into a confused passivity, but rather data to be harvested by a future, better version of ourselves an entertainingly optimistic one. Neuroscientists are also exploring today, however, the deleterious effects of our “always-on” modern lifestyle, with its Pavlovian jolts from Internet-connected mobile devices pinging our brains. In fact, given current medical science, Limitless may only be one step away from science fiction as drug companies tirelessly work on medicines that will do everything from reversing Alzheimer’s disease to performance enhancing our everyday minds. It’s also got something of the unsettling vibe of a Seconds or Manchurian Candidate as Cooper’s brainpower reveals not only his own inner strengths but conspiratorial patterns in the larger world.īurger, a Filmmaker magazine “25 New Face” following his debut feature Interview with the Assassin, keeps this speculative tale grounded in reality and recognizable human behavior. Limitless explores these ideas in a thriller that boasts a smooth performance by Cooper, a great De Palma-esque New York City chase scene, Robert De Niro in a supporting role, and at least one Park Chan-Wook-style bloodbath. It goes without saying that he bangs out the rest of his novel in a day, but what next? What would you do if you suddenly became a cognitive Superman? A chance encounter hooks him up with a black market miracle drug, a pill that magnifies brain function exponentially. In the film, Bradley Cooper plays Eddie Morra, a writer struggling with a long-missed deadline and a recently broken relationship. Neil Burger’s Limitless, from a smart, fast-moving script by Leslie Dixon and based on the novel, The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn, arrives at an interesting moment in the study of human consciousness. ![]()
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