Throughout Lewis Carroll’s iconic tale of discovery, Alice is presented with opportunities to make a decision about which path to take - the ‘Drink Me’ bottles in the first act, the mushroom about halfway through - and although these give her physical changes where she grows taller or shrinks to tininess, I’ll argue that everything after falling down the rabbit hole is a drug-induced daydream, perpetuated by the consuming of mind-altering chemicals throughout the story that ultimately help Alice come to a better understanding of herself. But one is never enough, is it? Lead man Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) desperately wants to be reconnected with his dead family by going into a dream within a dream within a dream, and so on, where time runs faster the deeper you go, thus creating some complications, and leaves us where I started - the ending.Ĥ. Writer-director-producer Christopher Nolan wrote an 80-page treatment about dream stealers after filming “Insomnia” (2002), which would eventually become the epic science fiction heist thriller about a group who commits espionage by taking a drug to infiltrate others’ dreams and steal their ideas.

Was the top still spinning or did it topple over? “Inception’s” ending was the source of many Facebook debates, and rightfully so. Trying to decipher the way “Inception” ends is as difficult as solving a Rubik’s cube -except that with a Rubik’s cube at least there is a definitive solution. And as we all know, this - and the adverse affect the drug has on humans - leads to the apes’ dominance of Earth, thus giving us the platform for the iconic stories that began with one tale from French author Pierre Boulle. The injection of ALZ-112 aids in primates’ increased intelligence, and eventually leads to their take-over of San Francisco where their abusive captors have been holding them. Perhaps as a nod to Charlton Heston, the star of the original “Planet of the Apes” (1968) who died from complications due to Alzheimer’s, the prequel to the pentalogy of “Planet of the Apes” movies centers around an experimental gene therapy developed to allow the brain to create its own cells in order to repair itself - in effect, the cure to Alzheimer’s. For $800 a pop, he gets to be “enhanced Eddie,” but all of this quickly turns into a classic case of “too good to be true” … or does it?Ģ. But after taking NZT48 half out of desperation and half out of boredom, his brain can suddenly access all of its power, instead of only the 10 percent we’re (fictitiously) told it can. “I don’t think my life is going to take some sudden upswing into fame and fortune by taking some shiny brand-designed drug,” Eddie says. Here we have some mind-altering films that shouldn’t give you side effects, but then again, we’re not doctors:Īs a writer who’s experienced writer’s block, I feel particularly inclined to side with Eddie (Bradley Cooper) in “Limitless.” After a bad run - not meeting deadlines, girlfriend breaking up with him and bad hair days - Eddie runs into his ex-brother-in-law who happens to be selling an experimental drug that obviously carries some serious consequences with it. Indeed, the raw science in science fiction is where films like “Lucy” and “ Limitless” get their start - like in a real-life scientist’s laboratory, they’re hypothesized and tested and released to the masses to alter our own states of mind for 90 minutes.

Science fiction need not always involve aliens, alternate universes, and spaceships (although those are well-loved aspects of the genre). This is Your Brain on Drugs: 7 Mind-Altering Science Fiction Movies

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