I just watched The Mandela Effect (2019).
Short one liner: Couple loses daughter, man goes schizo. Daughter reappears, now the wife goes schizo. Solution: Break into the university campus, merk out the turbo nerd who runs the place, then run a forkbomb on a quantum supercomputer, observing all possible events across all possible realities, Erwin Schrodigner says "fuck this I'm out", consensus reality shits the bed, the twist? they all lived happily ever after.
Likes: It's basiacally a script cribbed from old 4chan /x/ posts. They went through the effort of making props that feed into the "mandela efffect". VFX team earned their keep doing trippy datamosh effects too. Movies about simulations go well with doing ketamine. The supercompter is a big glowing black Kubrick monolith (or possibly designed by Seymour Cray), natch. Filmed on a "low budget", whatever that means.
Dislikes: This is one of those movies rhat seems to subscribe to the "baffle them with bullshit" school of filmwriting. To the average unwashed cretin they are presented with all these fragments of Big Ideas and expected to cobble them into a patchwork mysticism in lieu of actual understanding of the concepts. Put 'quantum' in front of anything and people assume "this is too complex for ME to understand!", or even worse, come up with wacky shit like
What The Bleep Do We Know? (
a.k.a. Where The Bleep Did We Scam The Production Budget For This From). A stream of faceless "experts" making radical claims,
Mr. Game Programmer Guy makes the claim that writing code for quantum computers is "similar to regular C code" (it's anything but, I still don't have a damn clue what exactly a Hadamard gate does)
Quantum computers are
not some sort of reality-destroying superweapon either. Sure, they make some previously hard math problems into easier ones (like factoring numbers) which kind of breaks some encryption methods, but at the end of the day it's not going to literally act as a
deus ex machina.
This reality-destroying quantum computer, by the way, is on a totally unsecured university campus, in a seemingly disused area, behind a single keycard-locked door, and
conveniently has a fucking root console just always running and logged in.. Passwords?
We don't need no steenking passwords! We're federales! Alas, no scenes of the gang teaming up to
hack the gibson.
Also, FWIW, "Mandela effects" in the film: Berenstain/Berenstein Bears, the Monopoly man's lack of a monocle, Curious George lacks a tail. It's not "Luke, I am your father", it's "No, I am your father" in Star Wars V. Jiffy/Jif peanut butter. Looney Tunes vs Toons. And, uh, Mandela's funeral.
My explanation? Humans are big wet squicky sacks of meat with a garnish of electricity. It's a fucking miracle we can manage to form a society at all the way the human body is built. I rejoyce in my fallability, it means I get to learn something new. I can't be right all the time. I'm already right enough of the time that I verge on being a smartass, actually...