Limitless

Limitless has a really wonderful concept. The idea of a chemical shortcut to ones own potential is tremendously appealing. The problem is that once the film was done I didn't feel it had said anything to further the idea or explore it's consequences. As if it had been so impressed with it's own single good idea that it had decided it was enough and handed in the script early.

One would assume it would be about the dangers of human beings with such powers, or the value of the journey to their discovery over merely the destination, but all of the dangers it presents are artificial, they are created by the situation and not the potential itself. The withdrawal issues involved with the drugs aren't analogous with failed potential, they merely exist to apply narrative tension.

A spoiler here, but it's hard to conclude my frustrated musings without it: At the end, he wins. There is no Pyrrhic victory or Faustian deal, he just carries on as if the previous hour or so have meant nothing. He solves all of his problems and lives happily ever after. There are some big problems with this. Firstly it's ignoring the fact that he has changed to such an extent he is a different person, his former life had to cease, but even worse it is saying that there is no value in the process of meeting ones potential, that it is the goal that is important, how it is achieved is inconsequential. The moral of the story is that the drug is pretty damn awesome, and I felt this missed the point entirely. He and we do not learn any kind of lesson, nothing is said about the nature of human potential itself, it's values or it's dangers, and while Bradley Cooper presents a character who's charismatic and sympathetic enough that we want to see them succeed, it needed to be in a way that found worth in who he was, and not in what the drug had made him.

I feel it had the wrong end of the stick when it came to it's essential science fiction element. It introduces it not to explore it's effect, but merely to provide a background to a separate plot. And while there definitely is interest in a super human who's power is his mind, it very much could have covered all of this ground without compromising on this part. It failed to live up to it's own potential. It was limited.