MovieChat Forums > Altered States (1980) Discussion > Started off promising and ended HORRIBLY...

Started off promising and ended HORRIBLY

posted 8 years ago by againstglobalism
5 replies | jump to latest

Seeing that this movie is from 1980, I was able to get passed all the cheesy special effects. Actually, some of the special effects are kinda neat, considering the year that the movie was made. William Hurt basically made the movie. His acting performance is what kept my attention. The entire cast did a really good job. At first, I thought this movie was going to be about a scientist studying drugs, sensory deprivation tanks, and psychonautics...which I found intriguing. But once the whole "primal beast" showed up in the plot, that pretty much ruined the rest of the movie for me. It went from William Hurt tripping in sensory deprivation tanks...getting married...tripping on Mexican mushrooms with a Native American tribe...to William Hurt turning into a caveman. I thought it was an extremely dumb plot twist. This movie had a lot of potential to be great, but failed miserably. Don't even get me started on the super lame ending.

[–] Riding46 (71) 7 years ago

I loved the ending! Fight it Eddie...fight it! He does and ends up hugging a nude Blair Brown.

[–] jdforyou1983 (1470) 4 years ago

I loved the ending

[–] whitecaps (40) 3 years ago

I agree. I just saw it and I thought it was a dumb choice as well to externalize his reaction to the drug in that way. Other people here mention how it was supposed to be Hurt regressing to 'primal man' but I thought that was just a lot of nonsensical pseudo science. It's possible in 1980 that was taken more seriously though.

However, I don't fully agree with the start either. What I didn't like was everybody kept saying how the Hurt character was 'mentally unstable' 'going insane' and similar comments, it must have been said at least 10 times in the film, but the Hurt character himself, other than his acceptance of the Blair Brown marriage proposal, struck me as being extremely rational, and not at all mentally unstable.

As an economist myself, I thought even his reasoning in accepting her marriage proposal was very utilitarian and rational.

I wonder if the frequent referral to him as 'mentally unstable' and so on was meant to be a running gag.

[–] Owlwise (1536) 3 years ago

Or perhaps his extreme rationality was the "mentally unstable" aspect of his being, one that could only be corrected by his final despairing realization that life & love, here & now, is was truly matters.

[–] cyguration (3951) 2 years ago

However, I don't fully agree with the start either. What I didn't like was everybody kept saying how the Hurt character was 'mentally unstable' 'going insane' and similar comments, it must have been said at least 10 times in the film, but the Hurt character himself, other than his acceptance of the Blair Brown marriage proposal, struck me as being extremely rational, and not at all mentally unstable.

Have you ever looked at the history of philosophers and scientists? Many of the bright minds of brilliant men were labeled as "unstable" and "mentally unwell", or "heretical", from Socrates to Jesus Christ, from Diogenes to Galileo, from Friedrich Nietzsche to Nicolai Tesla.

There have been plenty of brilliant, rational, and forward thinking men who have been labeled as "mentally unstable" by peers and contemporaries, despite them being anything but that.

I thought the movie did a brilliant job showing that Eddie's forward-thinking, and very rational approach to trying to discover the seed of existential thought. It made sense that people who are taught to only believe in corporeal rationality would think his methods lunacy, which is typically how people are trained to think about how they approach problem solving. Only the physical is real; only the real is rational.

The movie, I thought, did a magnificent job of showing the juxtaposition between someone willing to pursue truth to its final end using only utilitarian methods -- which I'm glad you brought up with the marriage proposal, as it showed us early on how Eddie's thought process worked, and that he was indeed not mentally unstable, but rather very stable and very efficient in how he thought about human relations -- and how phenomenological elements threw a wrench in the expectations of rational outcomes.

This was probably the only sci-fi horror/thriller I've seen next to the original Andromeda Strain that was intelligently written and didn't treat the audience as stupid.