When hitting The Matrix, Rowlands gets even funner (deal with the word), as he muses on the ability to ascertain any level of reality. This objective/subjective debate is one of those groaners that often leaves the laiety wishing all philosophers would die, because it’s a Catch 22 sort of argument. Nonetheless, Rowlands entertains as he enlightens, and the fact that he, as so many before him, cannot end the debate, is leavened by the smile the chapter leaves.

The Terminator chapter has one egregious error, and that is equating a cyborg with a robot, when a cyborg is a robotically enhanced living being — think The Six Million Dollar Man. The chapter also runs through classic ideas like dualism and materialism (philosophic not financial).

The Total Recall and The Sixth Day chapter deals with individuality in a very easy way, the idea being that there is a multiplicity, or river, of selves, rather than one single self; i.e. that we are, in every moment, the son and father of selves just past and about to be.

The Minority Report chapter deals with free will and determinism, but, Rowlands neglects to mention chaos theory in this section, which seems a pretty big omission for a 21st century book. And, on a purely aesthetic level, I would have preferred that he sometimes riff on not just the ideas behind the films, or the works the films derive from, but also how they sometimes fail to portray the ideas well. The works of Philip K. Dick are a good example, as almost all of the films of his that are based on short stories are way better than Dick’s original works, which were all neat ideas written in a very ham-handed and clunky style.

The chapter on Hollow Man - a quite bad film - deals well with the Hobbesian ideal of man as a brutalist. This chapter also raised an objection on a philosophic level, to me, and that was Rowlands’ claim that immorality is somehow inconsistent, while morality is not.

Again, leaving behind my morality/ethics objection, immorality is far more predictable than moral behavior, on many levels. If one knows that the immoralist has that nature, it is far easier to predict the negative consequences of said actions than it is the negative consequences of moral actions — the road to hell is paved, and all.