If you have been reading my blog regularly, you know I have been thinking a lot about free will. So this weekend I picked up two movies for which free will is part of the background message. It wasn’t really important to understand the plot or the action or the characters. But both of them had free will messages.
Minority Report was the first one I saw. Twice during the movie, the person who the precogs had “seen” commit murder in the future were made aware of this future. They had the choice to change what they did. They had the “free will” to use that knowledge to do something different. Both of them did something different, although not by much (I don’t want to spoil the movie with details. It’s not relevant to the post).
Then I saw Slaughterhouse Five. I heard that the Vonnegut book was fantastic so I was really looking forward to the movie. The free will part of the movie is that time is just an illusion. Everything that has ever happened, is happening now, and will ever happen, are really all happening at the same time. So whatever you will do, you have also already done and are doing now. In that view, the concept of free will doesn't make sense. This is a cool premise, but the movie sucked. I hope the book was better.
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