Best Philosophical Movies
Whether realizing the art form of filmmaking or not, directors and writers often use their preferred visual medium to tell a story. Ideologies, theories or whatever form of message is always decoded in this visual medium in hopes that the audience gets the message. The secret of making a successful film, especially when telling a story, is to avoid preaching.
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- DirectorPeter WeirStarsJim CarreyEd HarrisLaura LinneyAn insurance salesman discovers his whole life is actually a reality TV show.The Truman Show stars Jim Carrey as the main character. Everything about Truman is fake. His relationships, work, and his life was displayed for millions of TV viewers. What is real? This film is a reference to the thoughts of the great philosophers from Descartes to Sartre, Schopenhaur to Plato.
The Truman Show is an exceedingly disturbing movie, monitored by at least 5,000 cameras, broadcasting straight to the audience, available 24/7. It is as if we are the God who created Mr. Truman, watching him, following him and everything else he does, and unfortunately he doesn’t even know that he is the main cogwheel of his own world. This brings us to the topic, should God be allowed to be immoral or should he be bound by morality and ethics?
This is a psychological experiment for the audience to decide and debate. This also lures the audience into the capability of asking the question, do we have to obey his commandments heedlessly or do we ignore and exercise our own judgments? Then if we do ignore and exercise our own law, are we being wrongful? Will there be consequences for those actions? It is a sophisticated film but it gives the audience a ride to be the judge of social behavioral for this adventure. - DirectorLana WachowskiLilly WachowskiStarsKeanu ReevesLaurence FishburneCarrie-Anne MossWhen a beautiful stranger leads computer hacker Neo to a forbidding underworld, he discovers the shocking truth--the life he knows is the elaborate deception of an evil cyber-intelligence.This movie contains a great deal of religious and philosophical theories, which have been brought up by many philosophers, and it is still being viewed and studied today in the academic world. Plato’s idea of what we see in this world is a mere shadow of what truly exists, and that we have not seen what the world really is via our eyes. W.E.B. Dubois’ concepts of the double consciousness are being discussed, along with Descartes’ ability to think for oneself.
So, what is reality? Bear in mind there are no malicious forces deceiving us about the nature of reality. It is about our senses and thoughts, which deceive us. By providing a limited amount of message on what we have, it could alter or change our perception of reality based upon the variance that was given. From that information we will probably end up constructing models of the world. Our brain is pretty petrifying, isn’t it? - DirectorChristopher NolanStarsGuy PearceCarrie-Anne MossJoe PantolianoA man with short-term memory loss attempts to track down his wife's murderer.Christopher Nolan’s feature film Memento is an adaptation of a short story by Jonathan Nolan, “Memento Mori.”. Memento is a thought-provoking neo-noir psychological thriller film told in reverse and challenging in itself just to watch due to its non-linear, backwards narrative structure.
Nolan wants his audience to be part of Leonard’s life. Hence we are witnessing everything from an amnesia sufferer and ex-insurance investigator whom also investigated the brutal and cold-blooded rape and murder of his wife in a burglary, which caused him the amnesia due to a blow to his skull.
This movie visits the memory, perception, grief, self-deception and revenge of human a behavior, which talks about the importance of the body, being a self, a practical sense of time. Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher, asked once, “A dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also believe his master will come the day after tomorrow?” This is definitely an ambiguous film and it is disturbing, as the movie ends, “Is this the end of Leonard or is there going to be another Memento?”
- DirectorMichel GondryStarsJim CarreyKate WinsletTom WilkinsonWhen their relationship turns sour, a couple undergoes a medical procedure to have each other erased from their memories forever.Directed by Michel Gondry, Eternal Sunshine is a romantic comedy drama movie starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. It’s written by Charlie Kauffman, who’s behind breathtaking films such as Adaptation, Synecdoche, New York and Being John Malkovich. The couple undergoes anomalous procedures to erase each other’s memories after a fight only to find out they have been into this point of life before.
It’s deep, personal, and rich, yet fragile when things go wrong. Michel Gondry cleverly explores the memory, relationships, loss and the connections between these two souls. This film is one of the best films to have the right blend of romance, originality and surrealism.
- DirectorIngmar BergmanStarsMax von SydowGunnar BjörnstrandBengt EkerotA knight returning to Sweden after the Crusades seeks answers about life, death, and the existence of God as he plays chess against the Grim Reaper during the Black Plague.Director Ingmar Bergman, known for films Persona, Wild Strawberries and Fanny & Alexander, made The Seventh Seal, a cinematic model of existentialism, a man’s apocalyptic search for meaning. This extraordinary tale is about a knight who challenges Death to a fateful game of chess.
Although this movie is about understanding themselves in terms of metaphysical and philosophical questions, the Swedish director also wants the audience to experience this film with the issues of the problem of evil, philosophy of religion and existentialism. Bergman illustrates Bloch’s trouble with his beliefs incredibly well, the existence of an omnipotent God in the world, for his audience to view and judge for themselves.
This movie invites a lot of questions; it doesn’t sermonize nor belittle any specific demographic. Instead, it just states differerent opinion and lets the audience discuss it.
- DirectorRidley ScottStarsHarrison FordRutger HauerSean YoungA blade runner must pursue and terminate four replicants who stole a ship in space and have returned to Earth to find their creator.Blade Runner is a feature film based on the science fiction novel by Philip K Dick. Do Androids Dreams of Electric Sheep? Harrison Ford features as one of the Blade Runners hired to “Terminate” (Retirement) the Replicants, an enslaved human-engineered robot created by Tyrell Corporation’s genetic engineers. They were designed to serve as slave labor for exploring and colonizing other planets.
The movie portrays what it means to be human in the cybernetics era, raising questions such as: if artificial intelligence were placed in a body that looked and acted human, would it be considered a human? Would androids differ in any important way from the humans who created them? Existentialism! - DirectorStanley KubrickStarsKeir DulleaGary LockwoodWilliam SylvesterAfter uncovering a mysterious artifact buried beneath the Lunar surface, a spacecraft is sent to Jupiter to find its origins: a spacecraft manned by two men and the supercomputer HAL 9000.Bookending this tale of space exploration is a reflection on what humans have been and a meditation on what they might yet become. Following the arc of physical evolution in the film is the evolution of human intelligence from within to without to beyond.
As the earliest primates once discovered the tools needed to survive, modern science has now projected its knowledge to highly intelligent machines independent of human consciousness; from that disassociation is prophesied the possibility that the same intelligence may one day transcend itself and become a truly superhuman entity.
2001: A Space Odyssey has left us with a profound cinematic statement that is at once esoteric and humanistic. The very nature of its vision is sure to keep it perennially relevant and inspiring to future generations.
Don’t let pop culture or superficial summaries convince you that Nietzsche was the patron saint of depression. Far from it – for him, acknowledging hopelessness and despair was only the first step along the road to overcoming those limitations with strength and joy. He surely would have delighted in 2001: A Space Odyssey’s journey from ape to astronaut, and thrilled over its final leap from spaceman to astral entity, with humans as merely the bridge between the extremes.
If further convincing of the parallels between film and philosopher is needed, remember that the movie’s musical theme is “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, the title of Nietzsche’s magnum opus.