Wonderfully offbeat film!

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

As the memory formation takes place, the structure of neuron changes. The part in the movie where (getting rid of certain memory) this is shown is brilliant. Although going through every neuron one by one, changing in multiple numbers (for ease) would have been better. A technology where this would be possible would be very difficult to obtain. In my opinion that's impossible. It may be for the factors like human rights.Yet the movie is better in generating thrill across ones spine.There's part where the movie plays dumb. The lottery ticket that's obtained . . .is obtained from a cage below the paper. It's very obvious that the birds would have made the paper dirty. A little better scripting could have been resulted in an even more awesome movie.

As someone with a scientific background, I am always on the lookout for gross errors in the scientific logic and principles shown in the scripts of movies. I wonder how a creative endeavour that lasted months, possibly years, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, can have flaws in it that could be identified by someone with a fairly modest knowledge of science. My conclusion is either that the entire creative team - scriptwriters, producers, directors etc. - were unaware of these mistakes, which I feel is unlikely, or that they choose to treat their audience disrespectfully and assume that they will either not be aware of or care about these errors. I find this arrogant attitude to be extremely condescending and irritating, as it diminishes the pleasure that I get from watching the movies.In the case of 'Paycheck' I will leave aside the time-travelling aspect and focus upon a 'real' science flaw, namely the explosion of the liquid hydrogen which is used in large quantities to, presumably, maintain the future-predicting machine at a constant, extremely low temperature.Hydrogen at room temperature is obviously highly flammable, burning extremely quickly by reacting with oxygen in the air in a rapid, energy-releasing combustion process. However, whether it would ignite so easily in the liquid state, namely at lower than minus 253 degrees C (minus 434 degrees F), is another matter entirely, but I will give the film makers the benefit of the doubt on this.Nevertheless, this begs two significant questions: firstly, why did the highly-intelligent scientists involved in the project choose liquid hydrogen to cool the equipment when there are several obvious non-flammable alternatives, such as liquid helium (lower than minus 269 C), liquid nitrogen (minus 196 C) or liquid oxygen (minus 183 C)? The cynical answer to this question is, of course, that their use would not enable the equipment to be destroyed, and the villains wiped out, by the detonation of a cleverly-placed bullet!My second question is this: if the cooling liquid surrounding the equipment was so flammable why were the villains so happy to use guns in the vicinity of their expensive facility? Guns are obviously excellent weapons to beat one's enemy, but not in a location where the deflection or ricochet of as little as a single bullet may result in the complete destruction of the very object that you are trying to protect, as well as the likely death of both the shooter of the gun and their intended target! It is, therefore, illogical that the villains would choose to use guns in this area of combat.

Paycheck (2003): Dir: John Woo / Cast: Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, Aaron Eckhart, Paul Giamatti, Colm Feore: Science fiction blunder about receiving information or having it erased. Unfortunately after our attention spans and brains receive this film it is an unruly task to erase it from memory. Ben Affleck plays a genius who specializes in expensive projects for big corporations. In order to keep secrets safe he has his memory erased. Fine setup that boils down to Affleck on the run with bad guys in pursuit and only an envelope of items to piece things together. It is total contrivance how some of these everyday items just happen to be of service at just the right moment such as the paperclip. Then comes the action violence climax. Director John Woo is backed by special effects but not the clever suspense he sustained in Face Off. Affleck should have had different items in that envelope such as the screenplay of a better film and perhaps car keys so that he can drive off the set and never look back. Aaron Eckhart is obvious to his motives in a key role. Uma Thurman is a prop for romance. Paul Giamatti is a contact of Affleck's. Colm Feore is wasted as another villain. It seems to substitute a screenplay for special effects and anything that dazzles and fries the mind. The film exists for its action, production and complete nonsense, but for those seeking deep themes there is little payoff. Score: 4 / 10

Has the feeling initially that it's going to be an intelligent science fiction movie but slowly and steadily deteriorates into just another action movie. The acting is pretty wooden throughout, but you start by thinking that the intellectual workout is going to make up for the lack of emotional connection. Also the physics that this movie is built around is pretty ridiculous, and claiming that Einstein allowed for seeing into the future isn't really correct as far as I know--he famously demonstrated differential aging when traveling at different relative velocities, and, I suppose, the wormhole thing in theory allows for taking short-cuts between different areas of space-time, but nothing like a crystal ball (to my knowledge). As in all time travel movies, you can't really logically make the plot work if you think about it too much (which is the same problem most physicists have). Aaron Eckhart is reliably disappointing. He actually seems like a decently talented actor, but he pretty much only shows up in junk. He desperately needs some better guidance in choosing scripts, unless the only thing he's after is a big paycheck (get it?), in which case I'm sure he's doing fine. So if you're looking for some challenging Philip K. Dick stuff or something like that, pass on this. "Blade Runner", this isn't. (Not even close to "Minority Report" for that matter.) On the other hand, if you're just looking to kill some time with chases and explosions leading up to the obligatory predictable ending, this might work.