Don't listen to the negative reviews

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

I am quite happy for people to take so called mind expanding substances and I am really interested in what the effect might induce or enable that person to produce, principally by way of art or music. What I am not interested in doing is taking them myself or watching or engaging with someone taking them. I don't find the process particularly interesting, merely the results if any of that process. So, for me, this starts vaguely interestingly, becomes rather tedious and ends up very silly. I know there are fans and there are better people than I keen to explore the possibility of religious of other fundamental experiences, but not me. Difficult for me, therefore, to engage with this despite interesting psychedelic effects and brilliant performance from William Hurt.

If there is such a thing as genetic memory, than all the phases of human evolution must lie somewhere in our genetic code. What if there was a way we could tap into that stream of information through consciousness? What would we see? What would we learn? Professor Eddie Jessup (William Hurt in his debut role) is intrigued by the data being produced by the use of isolation tanks to induce altered states of consciousness, and decides to undergo the experience himself. What he discovers at first is the ability to relive with total clarity experiences of his childhood. As he continues these experiments, his visions become more acute and filled with religious illusions. Years go by and Jessup has become sedated with the trappings of academia, leaving him unfulfilled and longing for the good old days of experimentation and wonder. He visits a tribe of Mexican Indians that use a hallucinatory drug to evokes a common experience in all users and has the trip of his life! What might he learn inside an isolation tank while being under the influence of this drug? Would he be able to peel away the layers of evolutionary time back to early man and beyond? Perhaps even back to the first thought? I think it's a classic example of the genre & demonstrates that as weird & unlikely as a plot might be it can still come across as convincing genuinely eerie if handled right i.e. good acting, good script, compelling story line & maybe some decent special FX. All to often these days the special FX seem to be put before everything else & as such films of this genre lack substance & usually don't amount to much outside of the box office. For me the special FX in this film still stand up & look good. The trip sequences are extremely surreal & somewhat disturbing in parts but there are some great sequences that definitely start to mess with your head! The only reason this movie still works today is because the movie makes clear that in some tribes, there are substances that are traditionally and successfully used in spiritual rituals, and it is one of these that Hurt uses, in combination with sensory deprivation techniques, to try to get in touch with his own "genetic memory", for lack of a better term.Overall rating: 8 out of 10.

"Altered States" goes off the rails in the second half, but for a while there it really felt like it was building toward something good. It plies its trade on the senses as William Hurt's mad scientist takes to the isolation tank (on Mexican shrooms, no less) and the line between real and surreality continues to blur (cue the psychedelic effects). Trying to use mind-expansion to unlock other states of consciousness is where this movie peaks. But then Hurt actually regresses into a caveman and realizes his fall from banging Blair Brown to grunting and snacking on goats. What you hear right there is the sound of a trainwreck. I imagine this twas pretty potent back in 1980 - and a substantial portion of it still is.But it's half of a good movie.5/10

The main idea here is powerful and dear to me; a search for the original self before any thought, call it soul or constituting mind. I know this in the Buddhist context but there's a rich history spanning different practices that circles the same; that which gives rise to mind.Many of the most erudite makers have tried to see into this, from Tarkovsky to Weeresethakul recently. It always comes back to formative emptiness. The idea - observed in centuries of meditation - is to create stillness so the machinery of self outrun you and appear ahead. Here we get a few devices that probably had some leftover traction from Tim Leary's day, isolation tanks and hallucinogens the protagonist submits himself to; but these are devices that force what Buddhists and others have been achieving by direct meditation, stillness makes consciousness rise up in front of you. (drugs simply show the elasticity of mind; there's no deeper meaning in hallucination, that is the shape mind takes when frayed in this way, amazing of itself)But it's in the wrong hands here. We get lots of rational pecking at the shell, all this energy wasted in discussions about the scientific possibility of the endeavor, yelling about the ethics. Visions are boxed separately, never truly hallucinated. We get simply dumb science as hard metaphor; mind actually transforms matter, ego as actual monster. By the end a lot has been reduced to a hairy ape running around.And the maker must have pushed all his life against repressive religion, building all this negative energy against the mere shell of spirituality; so his search for a visual god is dynamic but ugly, a hysteric pushing back.The only way to get something out of it is to groove on it as a modern Frankenstein; with the search for the original self as an excuse for malformed visions, hoary spectacle. The parting notion is wonderful: love as bringing each other back.