Limitless is based on the film of the same name, which is based on a book of a different name, but that name was changed to "Limitless" in later printings to cash in on the film with which it has only passing elements in common, and yes, I did bring up the book so that I could use the phrase "cash in on the film with which it has only passing elements in common" because I thought that would be clever of me, even though I haven't actually seen the film so I cannot speak as to how accurate this phrase may be in this context, making my opinion/insight on the matter utterly unreliable, but hey, I'm still not as big a windbag as that Guardian writer who, on the day Terry Pratchett's final book was released, dismissed Pratchett as a mediocre writer in the same paragraph he let slip that he'd never read anything by Terry Pratchett (and whose name I have hilariously/aptly forgotten) because at least I don't expect to get paid for shovelling my horseshit opinions through the monitor at those unfortunate enough to come to my blog during a perfectly innocent Google search for - I dunno - inter-racial dwarf pornography thanks to my random use of tags to attract pageviews like flies to shit. Limitless is, however, not going to be much like the film, I can at least reasonably speculate, because Limitless the film is a high-budget allegorical drama with an A-list cast, while Limitless the tv show is a low-to-medium budget odd-couple buddy cop drama starring Dexter's skinny sister because of course it is. It's not terrible by any stretch, though it does often display an expedience in jogging through its plot beats that is as admirable as it is an admittance of its own unoriginality: we, the audience, know that the dedicated cop will be teaming up with the slightly unlikeable junkie guy to solve crimes because The Series Premise That's Why, but you know, the show could at least pretend there's a chance it might not happen, for like, tension reasons or something.
I'm not crazy about the superdrug McGuffin, either, as I am pretty sure the reason no-one does that whole "this drug will let you use one hundred percent of your brain instead of the five percent that normal humans use!" plot thing anymore is because it was thoroughly debunked many, many years ago, firstly on the basis that people pointed out that you didn't use 100 percent of your brain because you don't actually need to do so on account of you have bits of your brain that does different stuff at different times, like dreaming, reading, pooping, swimming, masturbating, running, martial arts, urinating, erm... origami? And secondly because some doctors and boffin types hooked up someone's brain and watched it for a bit before deciding that, yep, that was how a brain worked: one problem at a time. I suppose you could do all those things at once, and admittedly it would most likely be spectacular to watch, but not in the way that Limitless seems to think would be the case - though it's certainly lively enough on its own terms, interspersed with action beats for the main characters to negotiate in inventive fashion because someone opening up their brain's full potential also seems to make them a super athlete because of course it d-- you know what? Fuck it. I'm no scientist, that is probably how body science works for all I know.
No comments:
Post a Comment