Sin #12: Number Theories

It must feel very claustrophobic spending days on end in a tiny apartment covered wall-to-wall with computers. Even more so when you’re on the verge of finding a breakthrough that could very well change the world although you aren’t quite sure how to decipher it.

Max Cohen is going mad. Since he was a kid he’s suffered from headaches and nausea and has never been the social type. He’s a mathematician with an obsession; for him there are patterns everywhere, even in chaos, and once you can unlock a pattern you can pretty much predict whatever you want (like the stock market). His main obsession is PI or 3.1416 (an endless string of numbers that apparently don’t seem to have a pattern). One day his machine prints a strange set of numbers and mysteriously overloads and crashes. He thinks it’s a glitch and throws away the printed numbers.

But those numbers seem to form a pattern and he keeps seeing them everywhere he goes. It also turns out that he correctly predicted the numbers on the stock market. Things start to spiral down (pun intended) for Max since it seems that the set of numbers may have a more transcendental purpose and that he is not the only one in pursuit of the breakthrough.

On a tiny budget and with no recognizable actors, “Pi” is an extraordinary achievement. It is a paranoid thriller of fascinating possibilities that’s incredibly original and haunting. It was, pretty much, young director Darren Aronofsky’s calling card before he exploded into the scene with the brilliant “Requiem for a Dream” and recently gave us “The Wrestler” with Mickey’s Rourke’s great performance (This movie is by far his most accessible and the most rooted in real life).

To gaze at “Pi” is to realize that sci-fi doesn’t need huge budgets to be involving (the Spanish movie “Los Cronocrimenes” is a fascinating work about time travel that doesn’t involve elaborate special effects). At the time where blockbusters spend millions of dollars on effects, it’s refreshing to watch films that spend merely thousands on ideas.