Just a quick observation from playing "Heavy Rain" and being a huge Stanley Kubrick fan: I had heard before that Heavy Rain director David Cage was a Kubrick fan, and the game appears to have two clear allusions to Kubrick films.
First off, Norman Jayden sees an odd red-suited character while inside his ARI alternate reality system he uses to solve crimes. You can see what I'm talking about just briefly within the first thirty seconds of this video. Now, compare that to the bartender, Lloyd, who talks to Jack in "The Shining," pictured above. Start this video at 1:24 to see his role in the movie. Given that Cage is a Kubrick fan (in this interview, he says the game is inspired in part by Kubrick), this cannot be a coincidence that two semi-imagined characters in similar roles look so similar.
Now, there's also a similarity between "2001: A Space Odyssey"'s Louis XVI room at the very end of the film and Ethan Mars' fifth trial room. Skip all the way to 6:18 on this video if you want to see the final trial room, which I'll try not to spoil too badly here. Anyway, the room is completely unlike any of the other trials, being instead completely pristine and white. And if you compare the rooms side-by-side between "2001" and "Heavy Rain" it's just impossible not to see a similarity in their architecture and furniture.The typical theory as to why the room at the end of "2001" has Louis XVI architecture is that the protagonist Bowman is trapped in an alien zoo that has tried to build their best idea of a human habitat. So why does "Heavy Rain" use the same sort of thing? Without spoiling it, I can't even begin to guess, and I'm not sure myself, anyway. Interesting, though.
