Hey. Could we do that again? I know we haven't met, but I don't want to be an ant. You know? I mean, it's like we go through life with our antennas bouncing off one another, continously on ant autopilot, with nothing really human required of us. Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there. All action basically for survival. All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along in an efficient, polite manner. "Here's your change." "Paper or plastic?' "Credit or debit?" "You want ketchup with that?" I don't want a straw. I want real human moments. I want to see you. I want you to see me. I don't want to give that up. I don't want to be ant, you know?
Why it is hard sci-fi
Linklaters rotoscoped feature is a series of philosophical conversations inside a dream that the protagonist cannot wake from. The films working idea is that a sufficiently long lucid dream is indistinguishable from a life. The science is light, the rigour is in the references. The conversations cover free will, neuroscience, and the nature of consciousness, with most of the speakers playing themselves.
Science inside it
Lucid dreaming, the role of REM cycles in extended dream perception, the films explicit reference to the Gestalt of an ongoing dream and the Anthropic principle, and a particular argument about how dream state extends subjective time relative to wall-clock time. The film argues that the dream may be the protagonists post-mortem state and treats that as the strongest reading.