A few questions about the set he lived in...

I just chalked it up to it being a movie so best not to ask a lot of questions about things like this. They did the same thing in the hunger games. They could create a huge amount of fire/ fireballs, killer fog, blood tidal wives and lightning all from the control room. It's fantastical, don't put too much thought into it. Also, it is true that knowing exactly how everything worked would have bogged the movie down. It's just there to influence Truman's life and make a good story, and it does that. You don't need to know the complex inner workings of it.




Mirror mirror on my floor. Am I the prettiest at the store?

Interesting that the OP commenter complained about some things that are in fact theoretically explainable (as some of the responses above show), but, in spite of his thinking he's smart because he needs them explained, he missed *much more obvious* problematic things (and somehow he thought Sirius was the sun?! lol): the phases of the moon were often dead wrong, and very obviously so. For instance, at one point we see a sunset and the moon in the sky at the same time, and it's extremely obvious that the dark shadow side of the moon is VERY wrong for the position of the sun! Truman would have to be real dope to not recognize that, and the engineers who designed the dome and its effects would have to be real dopes, too. I must admit I do wonder why the filmmakers of this movie intentionally (obviously) made that particular "mistake".

A simple telescope or maybe even just binoculars would *immediately* prove to Truman that his world is unquestionably fake.

Not only did this thread's OP commenter not mention these *much more obvious* things, but they're all basically irrelevant anyway and have little to nothing to do with the quality of this truly great film.

The short answer to all the questions posed in this thread: a wizard did it.

The longer answer: nothing we see is literally impossible from an engineering or physics perspective, just prohibitively expensive and complicated. They're not exceeding the speed of light or operating perpetual motion machines. They're building giant domes (domes are a thing in the real world, and are actually better suited as megastructures than virtually any other design), creating artificial lights (you're probably within a few feet of one right now, and much more powerful ones are available, so there's no reason the sun has to be a bunch of lights clustered together), spraying water from a height (something that happened the last time you took a shower), moving water (hell, a basic Jacuzzi can do that), painting matte images (like painters have been doing for centuries, albeit not for movies until the last century or so), and so forth. Clearly somebody put in the effort, and, since this isn't our world, clearly the effort paid off, since the Truman Show has endured and prospered for thirty years in this world.

As for the complicated weather controls, this is a closed environment. There's no reason to control every single variable individually every time they want to do something. Instead, it makes far more sense to create programs that implement a certain set of conditions. (For instance: Light rain, 12 mph winds from the west, with variable intensity squalls in a progressive pattern, for example. Press "1" and you have it all with a single tap of the screen.) You are only guessing at how the energy is achieved and discharged. In this world of giant domes and billions of people watching a reality with fanatical devotion, one might decide that the show has a dedicated small nuclear reactor. Or whatever. As I said, it's all just basic engineering, and when you're dealing with the scale of a dome big enough to cover an entire town, an island, and a fair-sized bay, you're dealing with distances that don't lend themselves to careful examination. Next time it's a sunny day outside, go look up at the sun and ask yourself if you'd be able to make out details up that high under the glare of a light as bright as the sun.

"If the dome isn't made of pixels or whatever"

Um, pixels do not exist in the real world. You can't have a dome made of pixels. You can have a screen that's dome-shaped, you can have millions of LEDs (which would not be bright enough to mimic sun, moon or even stars believably, but then again, why would Truman need to know about any of these, they could just switch on and off some bright lamp in the middle of the dome, Truman doesn't know any better, how would he know it's not realistiC?)..

..but you can't make things out of pixels in the real world, because pixels DO NOT EXIST in the real world, they are NOT a substance, they are NOT a material, they are literally NOTHING.

They can only exist as 'unreal projections by display devices', that's all. They absolutely need a display device to be seen, otherwise they exist as DATA ONLY inside computers and processors (and GPUs and..)

So, please learn logic before writing posts about movies - it's hard to trust someone's logic that doesn't even understand what pixels are, and then brushes this off by offering us the intelligent explanation of "whatever".

Nothing can be built of 'whatever', as it's just an abstract mental construct, a pointer to absolutely nothing.

You couldn't bring yourself to mention LED lights or flexible display devices or anything? Really?

We do all of these things in movie studios right now. Why is it so implausible to think they couldn't do it in a dome