Action

Sherlock Holmes

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An action detective story reimagining of the famous British sleuth and his companion Watson as they battle the dark forces of Lord Blackwood who seeks to use black magic to take over the British government – or something like that, oh I don’t know, it hardly made sense.

The worldview of this story is naturalism, the belief that there is no supernatural and all effects have a natural cause. It’s thematic warfare is between the powers of reason and science (as embodied in Holmes’ acute power of observation) and the occult/mysticism/religion (as embodied in Blackwood’s occultic powers). Of course, all the black magic used by Blackwood is ultimately figured as sleight of hand tricks by Holmes, thus discrediting the supernatural as mere trickery. Blackwood is hung by the law at the beginning, but raises from the dead (an obvious reference to religion, um, let’s see, which religion has a man raising from the dead again?). He also engages in an occultic Rosicrucian like order that calls upon occultic powers, all of which have perfectly natural scientific explanations. In this story, the supernatural is an illusion, and we live in a closed universe of natural causes. It might have been a bit more interesting and indeed scientific, had there been something that remained beyond Holmes’ “amazing powers of observation” and acuity in describing the universe. I am thinking here of the movie Contact, where the scientist Ellie realizes a little about the limits of science and that love is real yet beyond her empirical measurements, and where the scientist ends up expressing a very real kind of religious faith and experience with science.

One way in which the movie shows the power of the mind is in its depiction of visualization technique. Every time Holmes is about to physically overcome an enemy, we see in his mind’s eye a slow motion version of what he is going to do, much like an athlete will visualize his action beforehand. And then we see the actual action in real speed, which gives a sort of double version of each fight scene, and affirms the power of the mind to actualize reality.

Avatar

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A crippled Marine joins a team of other humans from earth to displace a native people of another planet in order to exploit the natural resources over which they reside. The term “avatar” is a reference to the virtual world of “living vicariously” through a surrogate in another “world.” Thus, when you play World of Warcraft, the character which you play is your “avatar.” In this movie, however, they have managed to genetically create the body of an alien person, and the protagonist, through technology, is able to operate the body as an avatar. His mission is to learn the culture of the people so they can persuade them to move away. It’s a very simplistic moralistic tale with Manichean morality and stereotypical characters who obviously represent different “industrial complexes” of power to the filmmaker. There is the “corporate industrial complex,” represented by a greedy heartless fat cat corporation head who only cares about exploiting the natural resources and damn the inhabitants as savages (the resource material is called “unobtainium” an obvious reference to “unobtainable”). There is the “military industrial complex” symbolized in the mercenary who provides security, and only cares about killing people as his job, and then the “scientific industrial complex” represented in the compassionate scientist who wants to understand the culture and represents the Victorian “naturalist philosopher” notion of discovering the beauties of the natural world.

The story is a multicultural parable about the need to recognize our own prejudices by seeing through the eyes of the other. The Marine begins his mission by being a tool of the military and the corporation, but by the end he sees the world through the eyes of this primitive people (called the Na’vi) and ends up fighting against the humans and becoming one of the natives.

This story is also a pagan myth of Gaia goddess worship. Gaia is the pagan religious belief that the earth is a living organism and all living things are interconnected as “one”, and that “one” is god, a form of pantheism/panentheism. Gaia philosophy is what drives the extreme wings of environmentalism and it carries with it a corresponding hatred of technology as evil, because it depersonalizes life into mechanical functions, thus devaluing life, which justifies destructive selfish exploitation of nature. Technology is the enemy. This view posits human beings (or other sentient life forms) as mere servants of nature, which is worshipped as a goddess. It also believes in the “noble savage” myth of Rousseau, that primitive or indigenious native peoples who worship the earth are peace loving and harmonious with nature, while westernized civilization is what corrupts through science, technology and the destruction of nature in the name of “dominion.” Thus terms like “mother earth” versus “the sky god,” which is what Christianity is referred to as. The movie is an obvious parallel with American Manifest Destiny against the Indians as well as claims of “colonialism” against the West. When the Marine who has become a Na’vi avatar sides with the Na’vi, he says, “There is no green” where he comes from. “They killed their mother.” And in a critical political allusion to American foreign policy, the military leader says they are going to start killing the Na’vi in a “pre-emptive attack. We will fight their terror with our terror.”

In the movie we hear of “Ewa the goddess” of the natives, who makes up all living things,” “A network of energy that flows through all living things,” (standard New Age and Gaia doctrine). “Our energy is borrowed and someday we will have to give it back.” Like Native American religion, these natives kill an animal for food and then talk to their prey as a “brother, whose spirit goes to Ewa, and the body to the earth.” They claim that there is “electrical communication between the trees” that cover the planet such that it is all one big living organism that fights back against the bulldozers and military men. All the animals join in to fight against the exploiters, even the animals who were earlier seeking the Na’vi as prey. So, as in Gaia theory, the earth fights back against the evil human forces of exploitation (A theme also in The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Happening and others). And the image is one of “clearcutting” the rainforests as big bulldozers of the corporation begin plowing down the jungle.

Usually in movies, Christianity is linked up with the Enlightenment scientific industrial complex, as being the source of the problem through it’s theology of man’s dominion over nature. But in this movie, the only reference at all to this residue is the naming of the humans as the Sky People, a derivative of the Sky God of Christianity. But other than that, there is no explicit reference, thus making this more a movie about modern Enlightenment materialistic exploitation of nature versus the pagan mother earth religion.

The community of Na’vi also represents the oneness of existence. When the Marine avatar becomes accepted into the community, he is told he is “born twice. The second time earning a place among the people.” And the ritual is that they gather in a circle and all place their hands on one another, all the way to the accepted one, creating a huge circle of interconnectedness, embodying this theory of oneness, but also of the value of the community for individual identity.

One cannot help but notice the irony of a movie about the evils of corporate greed, and scientific technology in depersonalizing nature — a 3D movie made possible through the advanced scientific technology and greediest capitalist corporate environment that makes the biggest carbon footprint on the planet: Hollywood. In the movie, the “sky people” are criticized as “thinking they can take whatever they want.” But then the Na’vi leader yells his war cry, “This is OUR land. They cannot take whatever they want!” Kinda hard to take seriously a claim to private property, when the entire Gaia philosophy in the film is predicated on the negation of private property.

Twilight: New Moon

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In this Twilight series sequel, Bella, having fallen in love with a vampire, is now falling in love with a werewolf. What a dilemma for this love triangle. Should I love forever the vampire I cannot be with or the werewolf right beside me? Seriously though, first let me address the underlying myth that this shares with the first movie. We have a world in which the Cullen “family” are “good” vampires who seek to do good and abstain from their human bloodlust, as opposed to “bad” vampires who do kill humans. But all vampires are sworn to a code that dictates they never reveal themselves to humans or they will be executed by the vampire council in Italy. Now, we have werewolves who are not evil, but essentially good, and whose purpose is evidently, NOT to kill humans but to kill vampires. So in this mythology, werewolves only accidentally hurt humans if they get upset and their animal nature takes over.

I don’t know a lot about Mormonism, not being one myself, but I understand that the original author is a Mormon, which brings some clarity to the underlying worldview of the story. As I understand it, in Mormonism, redemption is ultimately achieved through moral living. People can redeem themselves by doing good deeds that outweigh their bad deeds. In other words, vampires CAN suppress their evil nature and be good. This is why Bella replies to a comment about evil nature, “It’s not what you are, it’s what you do.” This is opposed to, for example, the Judeo-Christian view of human nature that what we are results in what we do. Orthodox Christianity claims that no matter how many good deeds we do, they cannot cancel out our evil nature, which ultimately condemns us. Redemption is therefore found in having our nature changed by spiritual rebirth not suppression of our evil drives. The reason why Edward won’t “turn” Bella into a vampire and therefore be together forever is because when you do so, you lose your soul and are damned. This is when Bella disagrees and tells Edward, “You couldn’t be damned, it’s impossible.” He does too much good as a “good” vampire. “It’s not what you are, it’s what you do.”

The big obvious metaphor that we are hit over the head with in the movie is Romeo and Juliet. We see Bella and Edward studying the play, and watching a movie version of it in class. And Edward can recite the dramatic sacrificial love lines from heart. And of course, this becomes their own dilemma, as Edward wants to have the vampire council kill him, once he thinks Bella is dead. She becomes his only reason for “living.” And then, when Bella saves him from the vampire council by saying “kill me, not him,” she shocks them all that a human would do this in love for a vampire. The whole thing is a reflection of the cross-cultural love story of Romeo and Juliet.

I believe that the reason why this series of stories is so popular with women is because it focuses on relationships affected by this struggle of human nature. Another element of Mormonism that seems to connect with middle America is it’s traditional values. Here is a story that depicts strong men with violent natures (both the vampire and the werewolf in love with Bella), suppressing that nature and turning it into positive redeeming protection of the woman. Maybe this is a kind of backlash to the emasculated men of modernity. Edward is erudite and educated, but his drawing power is in how he sublimates his primal drive for Bella’s sake. He would rather give up his eternity than let her become defiled. He protects her virginity. Even when she decides to become a vampire, he says he will help her do so, only on the condition that she marry him. This is NOT your average male mook, moron, or stud depicted in most advertising and entertainment. And Jacob, the werewolf, who falls in love with Bella, is a beefy mechanic earthy guy who also sublimates his own nature to let Bella in and to protect her (I heard the women in the theater breathe out sighs of joy when he takes off his shirt – I kid you not). These are all the negative stereotypes of the male in our culture that are subverted in the story into positive examples of strong powerful males rescuing, protecting, and providing for the heroine female. This is traditional moral values on the roles of male and female subverting modern notions.

SIDE NOTE: Something struck me that I didn’t catch in the first movie. This notion of the vampires shining like diamonds when out in the sunlight seemed a strange new idea to me, and I wondered where it came from. As I understand it, Mormonism believes in polytheism, that there are many gods. A Bible chapter they point to is John 10 where Jesus quotes Psalm 82 in saying, “Have I not said, you are gods?” But in Psalm 82, it talks about a council of “gods” that God sits amidst, also called “sons of God.” The problem is that the Hebrew word for “gods” is elohim, which has different meanings in different contexts. While orthodox Christianity understands elohim in that passage as divine beings (such as angels), Mormons consider them actual gods, and examples of what all humans can become. But here’s the kicker. An orthodox Christian scholar of ancient Near Eastern languages, Michael Heiser (thedivinecouncil.com), has made an argument that another verse in Psalm 82 describes these sons of God as “falling like the shining ones [‘princes”].” This is also linked to a famous Bible passage, Isaiah 14, believed to be talking about Lucifer, the fallen angel, “O star of the morning, shining one [son of the dawn].” Again, Christians would see this as divine beings such as angels, while Mormons would consider them as actual deities. Maybe this is too speculative, but it appears that the Mormon author is casting the preternatural beings of vampires, as elohim, gods, shining ones. Some are fallen, some seek to do good. At one point in the movie, Bella goes to Italy and the council of elohim, I mean vampires, actually meets somewhere in or around the Pantheon, the oldest building in Rome, which was a pagan temple to the gods (plural, as in vampires?).

2012

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In this end of the world story, we follow John Cusack trying to save his estranged family along with a few others all over the world, before the earth’s crust shifts and destroys all life with tsunamis after the planets all align (Anybody remember the predictions of the Jupiter Effect back in 1982? — 2.0). Interesting how there has been a spate of end of the world movies in the last few years, such as The Day After Tomorrow, Knowing, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Road, and The Happening. Although I would say that these kind of disaster stories are in our DNA, because they continue to come up through all of history. One is reminded of all the parallel Flood stories in Mesopotamia, Sumer and Babylon as well as the Hebrew version of Noah’s Ark. Whether one believes they are legends or history, they all reflect our inherent need to face our mortality and values in life. There’s something about facing imminent and unavoidable mass destruction that makes you reevaluate what you are wasting of your life, and the need for change, repentance.

The obvious literal parallel of Noah’s ark is in 2012, as they build 7 huge arks to save important rich people who can pay their way with Euros (since dollars are not as trustworthy), along with a bunch of animals and important art works. The Ark concept was used in Knowing and The Day the Earth Stood Still. But interestingly, whereas the two “Day” movies and The Happening impute some environmentalist blame on mankind for causing it, 2012 does not because it is a huge influx of neutrinos from the sun that boils the earth’s core and causes the shift in poles and “earth crust displacement,” not unlike continental drift only really really quick. Regardless of this lack of moral blame, the movie still exalts a kind of nature worship that displaces supernatural religion with a humanistic naturalistic “we are all children of the earth” substitute. Here is how it does this:

There are all kinds of religious references in the film, from people praying to the cliché kook holding a “The End is Near” sign. A kooky but correct “Art Bell” character explains, “It’s the apocalypse, the end of days, like the Hopi Indians saw, the I Ching, even the Bible – kinda.” Kinda? There is a reference to the supposed Mayan calendar prediction to the year. But like all good humanistic subversions, the point is to undermine those religious images with a new humanistic definition. Thus, we see massive symbols of religion all over the world being destroyed, from a Tibetan monastery in the mountains, to the Rio de Janeiro Jesus statue to a long sequence of the Vatican being crumbled into dust and flames along with St. Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel. The extended detail and lingering on this particular Vatican destruction seems to illustrate an extra hatred and intolerance for this Christian religion by the filmmaker. The cracking of the Sistine ceiling goes right through the hands of God and Adam in the Creation of Adam, “splitting man from God,” a symbolic statement of this event. Interestingly, the director was too fearful of a fatwa being put on his head, so he avoided showing the destruction of any Islamic holy places, probably the only reason why he didn’t show the destruction of Jerusalem, since the Islamic Mosque resides in the heart of the Jerusalem Temple area. Evidently, Emmerich saved his hatred and violence for the peaceful religions that would not murder him for attacking them. When the US president gets on TV and tells the world, “We are one family stepping into the darkness together,” he begins to pray the 23rd Psalm, but is cut off before he can get past the first sentence. Another expression of the powerlessness of his Christian faith.

The central struggle in the film is the contrast of values of survival and self-sacrifice, as we see various versions of each worldview battling with each other through the different characters. The prominent one being a scientist and a Whitehouse politician from America. The politician exposes the cold reality why the government didn’t tell the people to prepare, because “Our mission is to assure the continuity of our species,” and of course if they told everyone, there would be mass pandemonium and anarchy, which would result in no one getting saved (and pandemonium does in fact, happen). As he says, “What did you think, the world’s going to sit around and join hands and sing Kumbaya?” The scientist thinks everyone should know the truth so they have time to face their demise together to comfort one another and ask for forgiveness. This is a good ethical conflict because both sides contain an equal amount of truth that causes us to think through values in conflict.

The politician says, “Nature will choose from itself by itself who will survive,” as they are about to push on without letting a crowd of people into the arks because there is not enough time or room to do so. And the scientist makes the thematic statement of the film, “To be human means to care for each other. Can we stand and watch each other die? The moment we stop fighting to save each other is the moment we lose our humanity. Everyone out there has died in vain if we start a new future with an act of cruelty” (namely leaving the extra crowds of people behind). This statement, coming as it does from a scientist as the symbol of nobility, embodies the storyteller’s view of the moral conscience residing in science rather than religion. This reflects the common modern worldview that believes religion is powerless, and then promotes morality without religion through a scientific viewpoint, which is all rather problematic, since science provides no foundation for morality. Only the religions that have been deconstructed or destroyed by the storyteller provide that transcendent basis for such a value system.

The Road

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A dark bleak view of humanity with a sliver of hope. This faithful adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel has an unnamed man and his unnamed son (thus suggesting a mythic narrative) in a very different kind of road trip movie. They are traveling south to the Eastern coast in a post-apocalyptic America, trying to find “the good guys” in a world of human gangs turned cannibals through survival of the fittest. No food left, not even animals to eat, due to some unnamed global catastrophe that reflects more of global cooling than global warming. They are surrounded by earthquakes, erupted volcanoes, burned up forests, and increasing coldness. There is no real plot to this story of father and son moving from one nihilistic situation to another, from one gang of cannibals to another, interrupted by stretches of travelling, again, very faithful to the book, and actually captivating in it’s touch on primal drives and primal relations.

It’s really a character study of father and son, as son learns the values of survival while maintaining that shred of human value in the midst of a world without values. As the father answers his son’s question about whether or not they would eat humans, “we wouldn’t eat anyone, cause we’re the good guys and we’re carrying the fire within.” That reflects the very simple black and white morality of the story, as some critics might suggest is a “Manichean view of good and evil.” Good guys who love and help others, and bad guys who eat others.

There is a thread of religious thought through the film which also is faithful to the book, sometimes to the exact words. At the beginning we see them pass a billboard with the graffiti of a bible verse from Jeremiah: “Behold the valley of slaughter.” Stories just tend to feel more “deep” when they reference Bible verses, especially in King James language. Anyway, the religion seems to be one of a replacement of God with humanity as the object of true worship. The father says some esoteric things like, “the child is my warrant” [to carry on]. “If the child is not the word of God, then God never spoke.” And another time about the child to an old man travelling companion: “To me, he’s a god.” To which the old man says, “To be on the road with the last god is a dangerous situation.” When the son asks his father. “How would the last man alive know he was the last man?” The father responds, “God would know.” The old man then says, “There is no God up there,” in this godforsaken world. But the father responds to his son quietly, “If I were God, I would have made the world just so, and not any different. And so I have you.” This would seem to suggest that the father has a view of a providential God who somehow mysteriously, and without giving us the answers, works through suffering. In a way one could read this as an affirmation of God in the midst of such suffering.

But I am not sure that is the point for the filmmakers. After all, God is replaced by the son for this man. The father puts all his hope in his son surviving to find the good guys and live with them. The son becomes the father’s hope, and God appears to be a metaphor for that hope. So when they stumble upon a survival shelter filled with foodstuffs, they pray (including the gesture of folded hands) not to God, but to the people. “Thank you, people,” they mumble, which certainly doesn’t reflect the Judeo-Christian attribution of all blessings to God, whether received through men or not. I suspect God and religion in this story is a picture of an optimistic mythic construct to help keep a person going — a metaphor for “human goodness,” which is all rather ironic, considering the bulk of humanity is out to eat them like packs of animals following an evolutionary ethic of survival. But it appears that the story contains that humanistic optimism in the goodness of man, that no matter how bad the world can get, there will always be some good people seeking to do right. The only question is: Whose right? By what standard is their right any more right than the cannibal’s right? Is their sense of right rooted in subjective humanity with its equal and opposite extremes of cruelty and mercy, or an external objective deity to whom man is accountable? Is that God hiding in the suffering or is he a metaphor for humanity creating its own values in a world without meaning? I am not sure what the story is really suggesting, but I suspect it is the latter.

Law Abiding Citizen

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This is a gritty violent story of prosecuting DA attorney, Nick Rice, played by Jamie Foxx, who only takes cases he knows he can win, and plea bargains the weak cases so he can play the legal system in order to maintain a high record of wins to better his career. In other words, he doesn’t really care about justice, and be bargains with murderers, and then he justifies his actions by an appeal to pragmatism, you get the best deal you can with an imperfect system. Along comes an inventor Clyde, played by Gerard Butler, whose family is killed by scum, and who experiences the injustice of our legal system as one of them gets away for plea bargaining, led by Nick, and against Clyde’s wishes. Well, I don’t know if this is possible, but the point of the movie is to show that our legal system is corrupted by this kind of bargaining with murderers and results in injustice through compromise with evil.

Clyde’s response is to snap and plan retribution for 10 years through his inventive mind. He hacks into the system and makes the one killer’s lethal injection execution a torturous event, and captures the other killer and brutally tortures him before killing him. Then Clyde hands himself in and in a poignant moment at his own defense for bail, he quotes legal precedent to convince the judge to let him go without bail. Then when she is persuaded, Clyde chastises her that this is what’s wrong with the system. He clearly should not be allowed to be let free, yet, he just used the rules to manipulate her and she bought it. He heaps insults upon her for her moral idiocy and deliberately loses the appeal and lands in jail. Then, while in jail, has worked out a way to start killing everyone connected to his case, from the judge to each of the lawyers, while he is in prison. Meanwhile, each time, he makes ridiculous demands, such as receiving a steak dinner and an ipod in prison, or he will kill the next person.

When Nick accuses Clyde of sick vengeance, Clyde tells him if he wanted vengeance, he could have killed everyone years ago. No, he is making a point, he is going to bring down the whole justice system to make that point. But what is the point? Well, we learn at the end, when Nick figures out how Clyde is able to do these killings and he turns Clyde’s inventions against him. Nick finally says, he won’t make any more deals with murderers like Clyde, and Clyde says now you finally get it. In other words, the whole moral of the movie is that justice doesn’t make deals with murderers, you’ll just get more mayhem because evil people will only use deals as weakness to exploit and will continue to do evil until they are forcibly stopped. Law Abiding Citizen is not merely a vengeance movie about vigilante violence, it is a moral fable that condemns our legal system. It makes the argument that making deals with murderers only results in more murder, that plea bargaining results in high recidivism rates of criminals being released into society only to rape and kill again and again.

In light of the current geopolitical events in Iran, I suspect the filmmakers may also be making an analogy to making deals with terrorists and fanatical dictators, which only result in perceived weakness by said terrorists as an opportunity to exploit for more power and violence.

Surrogates

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This is a story of cop Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) in a world where people live their lives through robotic surrogates that they control remotely through virtual computers. The moral of the story is spoken right up front in the narration by the human activist that “We weren’t made to live life through machines, “ and that “what it means to be human is to sacrifice yourself for a higher cause and purpose.” There are people living in surrogate free zones because they want to be more human. It turns out there is a weapon that will kill people through killing their surrogates, never possible before. But the big crime turns out to be the repentant creator of the surrogates attempting to download a virus that will breakdown every surrogate in the world so that people will be forced to life real life again. The movie is really just an amplification of the avatar “social networking” that already goes on online. People live through false identities, they choose to all be younger and prettier avatars than to accept themselves as they really are. They become shadows of themselves, projections of their fantasies rather than reality. They don’t want to face reality. They seek to experience the pleasures of life without having the consequences. But as a main character says, “we must sacrifice certain pleasures to be truly connected.” So the cop and his wife suffer from the loss of their son, and she seeks to stay in the false world, while the cop seeks to redeem their marriage and make the human connection in their real bodies and souls. By the end, when the virus works and all surrogates drop, we see a lot of fat people walking around outside in their pajamas dazed as what they have been missing in the real world, but certainly better for it – because “We were not meant to live life through machines.”

Pandorum

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The world overpopulates and sends a ship of thousands of people to a distant planet to start over. But in the midst of the hyperspace sleep, some of them come to and realize that there are creatures hunting and killing survivors around the huge space ship. Turns out these creatures are some of the original passengers, who were accidentally mutated by being fed strange nuclear chemicals and turned them into predator monsters. Pandorum refers to the psychological state of coming out of hypersleep and becoming so disoriented that you go crazy and do things like killing everyone on board by jettisoning their pods into space. Of course, this is what happens to the captain who argues with the hero at the end about destroying lives on board. The captain who becomes a villain in his pandorum state says, “It’s easy when you free yourself from the chains of morality.” The theme of survival versus sacrifice and these mutated creatures are pure predators and the humans must save the rest of the hypersleep passengers on the ship by resetting the nuclear reactor on the ship. The story seems to be comparing pure survival and predatory nature with a moral approach to being human.

Inglorious Basterds

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An “alternate history” story of a group of commando Jewish-Americans led by Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine, who set out to kill as many Nazis as possible behind enemy lines in occupied France, and end up stumbling upon an opportunity to take out the major leadership of Germany, including Hitler, Goering, Goebels and Bormann. While this film has its share of exaggerated Tarantino violence, it’s rather restrained compared to his previous films, focusing more on long dialogue tension build-ups intended to mimic the spaghetti westerns he is trying to imitate, along with the melodramatic spaghetti western soundtrack film techniques. He remains a pastiche postmodern as well with his corny side-comment flashbacks and comic book title cards.

Brad Pitt’s cutesy uneducated hick accent turns every expression of violence he says into a joke, which adds to the dehumanizing aspect of the film. Interestingly, the film does not merely capture the dehumanization of the Jews by Nazis, but it apparently accuses all sides of such dehumanizing. The strongest sequence suggesting this is a very long sequence of an SS Officer describing how Jews are seen by the Germans as rats (but allegedly without malice), immediately followed by Pitt lecturing his squad about how much fun they are going to have killing and scalping “Gnatzis” because they are not human anyway. His cute hick accent turning his joy of violence into entertainment. Pitt’s lecture dehumanizing Nazis is no less dehumanizing than the Nazis, thus hinting at a suggestion by Tarantino that all races, even Jews, can be driven by racist hatred and violence. Perhaps to Tarantino, the grotesque violence against the Nazis by the Jewish commandos is justified because of how evil they are, climaxing in a shot of Hitler’s body and face being blown away by Eli Roth’s machine gun in a Bonnie and Clyde ending.

Hitler himself is depicted as a stereotypical raving madman rather than a deliberate calculating man of evil, thus trivializing evil and reducing it to insanity, which no doubt will be felt as an insult by those who know all too well the banality of evil. But the alternate history of actually assassinating Hitler seems to be a catharsis for all the 17 historical attempts we know of that ended in failures. Rather than playing to history and creating a tragic heroic failure, as in true stories like Valkyre, Tarantino surprises us and opts to satisfy our movie fantasy for once, just once, to dream the “what if” of one of those attempts actually succeeding. No doubt, it will be considered catharsis by moviegoers without concern for historical truth, but as the trivialization of evil by actual victims of history.

District 9

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This story is about a huge alien spaceship having to dock over Johannesburg, South Africa for some kind of energy problems. The aliens can’t get home to their planet. They stay there for 20 years and end up being treated like illegal aliens or refugees in a loud and obvious political metaphor for today. They are herded into “District 9,” a walled off internment camp for the 1.2 million aliens from the mothership. It all looks like the refugee camps we’ve seen around the world, and it is ministered by the obvious U.N. parallel, the M.N.U., Multi-National United. This metaphor also carries xenophobic and racist overtones as we see in the movie all the signs and rules “segregating” aliens and humans: “Humans Only,” signs for bathrooms, etc. The aliens look like shrimp to humans, so they develop the “dehumanizing” name of “prawns” to refer to the aliens, just like racist lingo all over the world does: “Caffer” in apartheid, “N-word” in America, “Cracker” for white people, and on and on.

The hero, Wikus, a nerdish South African, begins his journey as a heartless government bureaucrat, more concerned about following protocol than about the unequal treatment of the aliens, such as the suppression of their reproduction by extermination of all their eggs, as well as the brutal treatment of the aliens, who have turned scavengers and ghetto-like in their behaviors. It is shot like a reality news show documentary to heighten the sense of reality, so that it’s not so much a sci-fi picture but closer to home, much like Cloverfield did with the handheld camcorder subjective view. Although this movie does have 3rd person omniscient moments to progress the story interspersed with the reality show style.

Anyway, so Wickus begins his journey as a heartless bureaucrat, but when he stumbles upon some strange liquid that splashes in his face, and begins to turn him into an alien, we see the obvious theme that xenophobic or racist fear of the other dissolves when we see “the other” or our enemy in ourselves, or when we see the world through the eyes of “the other.” No better way to accomplish that point than to literally turn into one of the “other.” Then of course, the government captures Wickus in order to experiment on him and discover how this genetic transformation can benefit the military to be able to use the alien weaponry, which only works with alien DNA. So Wickus discovers an entire laboratory where humans are experimenting on the aliens and cutting them up into scientific pieces for analysis, another strong parallel to Nazi, Japanese, and even American experimentation done on unwilling participants deemed as lives unworthy to be lived or as less than human. This movie does not place a lot of faith or trust in big government bureaucracy as a means for addressing the issues of illegal aliens, refugees or racial segregation.

One can surely understand why Wickus transforms and seeks to help an alien father and his son get back to the mothership in order to escape and bring back alien help from their planet. Especially, since Wickus by the end of the film, turns completely into an alien, waiting for the return of the aliens who will supposedly be able to turn Wickus back into a human. Wickus even ends up taking up arms as a “freedom fighter” against the M.N.U. forces trying to capture him and stop the aliens from leaving. Wickus will not doubt ever call the aliens “prawns” again.