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Cooper, left, mixes it up with DeNiro, who plays his boss, then evil adversary. |
In a video that quickly made its way across the Web this week, a man in an orange coat demonstrated how he'd hacked into Times Square's massive video screens using only his iPhone and a humble transmitter that looked as if he'd salvaged it from a Commodore 64. The video garnered some 800,000 views on YouTube before the New York Times reported that it's a fake—you can't really go around broadcasting clips from your iPhone onto the JumboTron of your choosing. (And thank goodness for that.)
The video, it turns out, is a viral ad for Limitless (Relativity), the new movie starring Bradley Cooper as a man whose life is transformed by NZT, a designer drug that allows him to harness his full cognitive potential. I can't say I really understand the connection between the video and Limitless—is the inventor of the iPhone gadget supposed to be hopped up on NZT? It's true that both films proceed from plausible premises, and both toy with our sense of what's possible in our quicksilver times, but only one avoids descending into a confusing, dispiriting mess. It's the one that's two-minutes long
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Limitless is frustrating, in part, because it could have been much better. The set-up is simple but clever: Performance-enhancing drugs already help us do our homework, have sex into our dotage, and hit monster home runs. What if someone developed a drug that allowed us to concentrate for hours on end, access all of our memories instantly, and perform complex mathematical calculations like a supercomputer—a sort-of Adderall ad absurdum. It doesn't seem so farfetched that such a drug might be around the corner. How would we use it? Would it merely allow us to become our best selves? Or would such heightened powers turn us into fundamentally different people, swollen Mark McGwires of the mind?
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