Common Flaw All Movies About Geniuses Seem to Have (But Some Find A Way Out)
There is a necessary step in making a movie about genius that some filmmakers tend to forget.
Movies about geniuses have become a small sub-genre over the years, attracting audiences with stories about extremely intelligent characters.
While most of them focus on the lives of real-life geniuses, some take a fictional route, and that is when things start to get a little shaky.
Limitless, a 2011 thriller based on Alan Glynn's novel The Dark Fields and starring Bradley Cooper, did just that, telling the story of Edward "Eddie" Morra, who discovers a powerful new drug called NZT that allows people to unlock the full potential of their brains (which is a myth, by the way).
However, those who stop taking the drug begin to experience rapid brain deterioration with potentially fatal results, which makes for some tense moments in the plot.
While the movie received rather average reviews, it is still quite fun and entertaining, but we are here to talk about its main flaw.
The supposedly brilliant decisions made by our protagonist are in fact rather questionable, with the dumbest one being taking $100,000 from an obviously dangerous loan shark when Eddie was already multiplying his money through the stock market.
Some fans say it is because even the smartest people make mistakes, but this one just goes against basic survival instincts.
And the answer is really quite simple: the script is written by a completely average person, without the genius level intellect.
Another movie that fell into this trap is Lucy (2014), with almost exactly the same premise about the mind-enhancing drug, but this one goes even further in its stupidity.
The solution to avoid this mistake is simple, as movies like A Beautiful Mind, Rain Man, and several others show.
These movies portray their characters as imperfect, despite being extremely intelligent, for example, suffering from mental illness or autism.
But as soon as the creators try to make their main character a godlike individual capable of unimaginable things, the story slowly begins to fall apart.