The book has a good Introduction to Rowlands’ ideas and methods, then has nine formal chapters, dealing with specific themes:
1) Frankenstein: the meaning of life (actually Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein).
2) The Matrix trilogy: the certitude of ontology.
3) The Terminator 1 and 2: the mind/body problem.
4) Total Recall and The Sixth Day: identity and reality.
5) Minority Report: free will as illusion.
6) Hollow Man: the will to morality.
7) Independence Day and the Alien series: the limits of morality.
8) Star Wars: the concepts of good and evil.
9) Blade Runner: death as the key to life.
Now, I will briefly comment on these themes and film choices, but I won’t delve more deeply into them, for any agreement or not with Rowlands’ posits is besides the point of a critique of the book. The matter is whether or not Rowlands conveys these thoughts and ideas well, even if the ideas may not sit copacetically with the reader.
That stated, just peer at the film titles and ask yourself, if you watched any or all of these films, how many of you would have made such connections? I doubt many would have. Rowlands also displays his best witticisms when skewering his own claims, such as positing Arnold Schwarzenegger, filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, and sci fi writer Philip K. Dick as philosophic giants.
I have some minor quibbles, here and there, with Rowlands, such as sections 6 through 8, where he makes no distinction between religious morals (that imposed from without), and secular ethics (that immanence that emanates without), for using the term moral interchangeably with the term ethical is simply confusing, but, as most modern dictionaries likewise make little distinction between the two, this is not a grave flaw of Rowlands’, nor his book.
To go chronologically, the Frankenstein chapter gives one of the better descriptions of the Sisyphean dilemma, and opens the book with the biggest question — being the meaning of life. Some may quibble that why life rather than not, or why anything rather than nothing, are more empirically based queries, but the meaning of life is certainly at the root of many epistemologies.
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