Date: 2026-08-06
The day after watching Spaceman, as I described in my last journal entry, I was not sure if I would watch another movie, as I felt that if I did then I would feel obligated to describe it in another journal entry. I therefore felt that if I watched a movie that I would feel some pressure to pick an interesting movie to describe, which felt like it would be a bunch of work, and so I was reluctant to do it.
When the end of the day came, however, I started looking through the options on Netflix, and I was inspired to watch the movie The Woman in the Window. This is a movie that is about a woman who is afraid to leave her house. Apparently the Netflix algorithm felt that I might enjoy it if I had enjoyed The Butterfly Effect. This seemed like an appropriate movie to watch considering that I personally am currently afraid of leaving my apartment. I actually have a big sign in the window of my apartment right now with my website address, asking my neighbours for help, which they have been ignoring. It is possible that my neighbours might believe that I have a mental illness, which might be why they are ignoring the sign, and so perhaps they believe that I am similar to the woman in the movie. Therefore, it seemed like it might be interesting to watch the movie in order to compare her situation to mine.
In addition to those normal reasons, while I was considering watching the movie I was reheating some vegetable samosas, I had a timer counting down on my watch, and I happened to look at my watch just as the timer was showing 33 for the seconds that were left on the timer. A little while later, I looked again and the timer was showing 23 for the seconds. If you have read the page on my website about being trapped in my apartment, then you know that these are numbers that I have been thinking might be associated with the brain hemisphere language. In addition to that, as I have described elsewhere on my website, I have a theory that we all might currently be living in a computer simulation generated using AI, which is why we are alive at the time when the AI singularity appears to be just about to occur. If we are actually living in a computer simulation, then it is possible that any coincidence that I observe might actually be an intentional message from whoever created the simulation. Therefore, I felt that perhaps the fact that I saw those numbers was a sign that I should watch the movie.
I enjoyed watching this movie. I definitely sympathized with the woman who was afraid to leave her house. Her situation seemed similar to mine in a few ways. In particular, at one point in the movie, she contacted the police because she believed that a crime had been committed, and the police assumed that she was wrong or was making things up and ignored her concerns because they felt that she had a mental illness. There was one point when she said a bunch of stuff to the police and a few other people that sounded crazy because she was getting overwhelmed, and they all just looked at her with empty expressions without saying anything. I empathized with her so much at that point. This part of the movie, when she was freaking out and the police were treating her like she was crazy, makes me think of the time that I thought my computer had been hacked, contacted the police, and then had the police not believe me and instead tell me that they felt that I had a mental illness. The police in the movie were slightly more understanding than they were in my case, because at least in her case they did not decide to force her to leave her house and bring her to a psychiatric facility against her will. I do not want to spoil the end of the movie, however in the end we find out that she was not entirely wrong about her concerns. The part of the movie where we learn this was gratifying to watch.
Her psychological situation seemed like it differed from mine in a few significant ways, however. She appeared to actually have visual hallucinations, which is something that has never occurred in my case. Also, she seemed to believe that she would feel less anxious if she left the house while hiding under an umbrella. This differs from my case, in which my anxiety is mostly related to concerns about the safety of my property inside my apartment, combined with a small amount of concern that my family might actually try to physically harm me if they were near me, neither of which would be addressed using an umbrella. I have described the reasons for my concerns on my page about being trapped in my apartment, so you have to read that page for the full details.
Prometheus is a movie that I have seen before, however I decided to watch it again. I had not seen it in a long time, had forgotten many details, and was in the mood to watch another sci-fi movie that takes place in space. Netflix told me that the movie would be leaving Netflix soon, so I figured this was a good time to watch it again.
Prometheus is a prequel to the well-known sci-fi horror movie Alien, which I have also seen before. Prometheus is about a scientific expedition to a planet far away from Earth which is being investigated because the people in the movie believe that they have found ancient references all over Earth to a constellation which contains the planet. They suspect that aliens from the planet might have visited Earth a long time ago, and might have originally created humanity. They visit the planet in order to try to determine if this was the case.
One thing that I noticed about the people in this movie is that they are strangely comfortable with taking enormous risks. At one point they are exploring a strange, empty alien structure that they find on the planet and their sensors tell them that the atmosphere is breathable, so they immediately decide to take the helmets off of their space suits and breath the mysterious alien air. It made no sense to me, as it seemed pretty obvious to me that this was a bad idea. If I were on that expedition, I would have refused to leave the spaceship in the first place.
Prometheus is a horror movie, and it was visually a bit disturbing at certain points with people being physically injured in ways that look painful, including having alien organisms occupying spaces inside their bodies. Personally, I can handle this kind of movie occasionally, however for scary movies I usually prefer movies that are more psychologically scary and do not have these kinds of scenes. People often get shot in action movies, and that usually does not make me uncomfortable when I watch it, however usually the camera does not focus on the injury and it ends quickly, which was not the case in Prometheus. Regardless, I enjoyed watching Prometheus on this occasion. The automated surgery machine was an impressive example of a potential future technology.
In addition to the Alien and Prometheus movies, which I have seen, I have also tried to play the video game Alien: Isolation, which takes place in the same fictional universe as the movies. I found the video game to be way more anxiety-inducing than the movies. I was not able to get very far before I had to stop playing. The aliens are terrifying, and you can die very quickly before having a chance to do anything to stop them once they are chasing you.
I decided to watch The Fifth Element the day after watching Prometheus. The Fifth Element is one of my favourite movies of all time. I have seen it multiple times and so I knew what to expect. The Fifth Element is similar to Prometheus in the sense that it is a sci-fi movie with a storyline that is based around the idea that aliens came to Earth a long time ago, and that there are ancient artefacts on Earth which reference this fact. However, unlike Prometheus, it is more of an action movie.
There are a lot of things that I like about The Fifth Element. One of the lead characters, Leeloo, is woman that I find very attractive. Leeloo is actually created by a machine at one point during the movie from some DNA that was found after an alien spaceship was destroyed, and her background is mysterious. She is often referred to as a weapon, though it is not clear what that means until the end of the movie. At the beginning of the movie, she does not speak English and has to learn it as the movie progresses, which she does by reading information on a computer. It almost seems like she is reading Wikipedia, as she apparently learns various concepts by reading articles in alphabetical order. Once she gets to the article about War, she becomes sad. One of the themes of the movie is about the concept of good fighting evil, and her character is one of the characters representing good, so it makes sense that she does not like the concept of war.
Another thing that I particularly like about this movie is the setting and the technology that is portrayed in the movie. The movie takes place in the future, with the parts on Earth taking place in a dense urban metropolis with cars flying between the buildings. The main male character, Korben Dallas, lives alone in a small apartment. Before he meets Leeloo he references the fact that he is single and is trying to find a girlfriend, so I empathize with his situation. His apartment has a bunch of interesting technologies, with various parts that move around and slide in and out from the wall in order to save space. It seems like it could be a condo in Toronto in the distant future.
One thing that is interesting about how technology is portrayed in the movie is that despite the fact that a lot of advanced technologies appear to exist, many things have not changed which you might have expected to have changed as a consequence of the advanced technology. For example, Korben works as a cab driver. Even though he drives a flying car, and the car appears to have the ability to drive itself autonomously if the feature is enabled, Korben still apparently manually drives his car a lot of the time, and his job is still apparently useful and required. Similarly, at one point Korben wants food, and he obtains the food by ordering it from a guy who appears to be operating a kind of flying restaurant, which parks itself outside of his window. The person operating the restaurant chats with Korben and serves him the food himself, even though clearly with the technology available it seems likely that there is probably also a way of obtaining food that would not require interacting with a human. It appears that in the future, interacting with humans is still considered valuable enough that people are willing to pay for it even when it is not required.
Another technology that I found interesting was that Korben has a tube inside his apartment which physically delivers mail directly to him. This tube is used even though clearly they could use some kind of electronic system similar to email to send messages. Personally, now that I have had the experience of my computer appearing to have been hacked, I can understand why people in the future might still value messages being printed in a physical form and being delivered to them. It seems like it would make it much more difficult for a computer hacker to change or delete the message.
Aside from the technologies in the apartment that Korben lives in, I also find the technologies involved when he travels to a space station designed for relaxation to be highly interesting. He travels on a spaceship which appears similar to a kind of luxury airplane, with a physically attractive, all-female cabin crew tending to the people who are travelling. Once he arrives at the space station, he is told about all the luxurious features of the space station, which apparently somehow has beaches, and it seems somewhat similar to a kind of resort hotel. It seems like a nice place to go on vacation. While he is on the station, he attends an opera with a singer that appears to be some kind of alien. The scene in which the singer is singing is epic, and is highly enjoyable to watch. I hope that in the future, our civilization is able to build similar kinds of space stations.
With the exception of the aspects of the future in which it appears that people still require a job to survive, I very much enjoy the way that the future is depicted in The Fifth Element. I like to imagine that the jobs that people have are actually optional and that they are doing them by choice, and that Korben is actually intentionally role-playing a certain kind of character that his customers are voluntarily choosing to interact with rather than use an automated taxi. I like the idea that for each type of service, like with the cab driven by a human or with the flying restaurant operated by a human, that customers have the option of either using a fully-automated method or to pay extra in order to have a human provide the service if that is what they prefer. If our society evolves in this way, however, personally I think people should be able to choose the gender of the person providing the service. I would feel uncomfortable having some random guy operating a flying restaurant looking into my apartment window and expecting to chat with me, however if the service was going to be provided by a woman I think I could see myself wanting to pay the extra money in order to have a human provide it. I am not sure if that would be sexist or unfair. Hopefully there are other people besides me who would want to pay the men to do those jobs and interact with them, especially given that I am male.