5. Pi (1998)
Max Cohen is a gifted mathematician who seeks to understand the universe through numbers. He is paranoid to a schizophrenic degree and has problems socialising with people. The one person who talks to him is his old maths tutor Sol Robeson. Max makes stock predictions on Euclid his computer. It crashes after it spits out a 216 number as well as a pick on one tenth of its single value. However, checking the Stock Market the next morning he sees Euclid's predictions were right. Unsettled he tells Sol all about the experience and the number that he threw away. Sol asks him about the 216 number and tells him to take a break - Sol himself had come across that number on a previous occasion and I think he had a bad experience with it. Max meets an Hasidic Jew called Lenny Meyer who is doing mathematical research into the Torah. Max is very interested in his work as it holds some parallels to his own Research including the Fibonacci sequence. Max is also approached by a Wall Street firm to work for them. He eventually accepts the offer and takes possession of a classified computer chip called 'Ming Mecca'. Using the chip, Max runs the Torah's mathematical data through Euclid. The same 216 number appears, Max has an epiphany and passes out. When he comes to, he is clairvoyant and can visualise stock market patterns. Sol tells him again to take a break but he is accosted on the street and menaced by the Wall Street firm who want him to explain the number. Lenny and his friends save him but they too want an explanation of the number. They believe the number will trigger a Messianic age as the number is God's name. Max won't tell anyone the number and runs away. Trying to understand it, he reaches a crescendo and standing in his trashed apartment performs a DIY trepanation on himself. He is at peace at last. The film is incredible for what it managed to achieve on its $60,000 budget. It puts big Hollywood productions to shame. Aronofsky is infinitely inventive in how he shoots and directs the film, giving it a highly quirky edge that stamps it out as a very unique film. Geniuses who are close to madness is quite a hackneyed movie theme but Sean Gulette does a good job of portraying an insanely gifted man on the edge. He cannot stop his mathematical mental quests that drive him to a tormented state. At the end he is finally free of his tyranny.