I believe Mr. Bennet has read many times about motifs of mazes and foreshadowing, as well as, the combination of film noir and science fiction genres. Not to mention the amazing premise of the film. The edge of your seat suspense that keeps you guessing until the very end. This post will not be about the amazing cinematography or the camera angles.
This post will address the very pertinent questions this movie raises. What makes us human? What is the soul? Can it be defines as a sum of all our memories? Does love cross boundaries between lives? I believe the director's stand is that love does in fact prove the existence of the soul. The world they live in is a dystopian universe in which identity has become something easily manipulated and manipulated often. People's lives are changed around every night; they can never live any one life. In this way they disorient us. If this is in fact an experiment and the aliens are testing us to see the origin of the soul then they would be looking for something that stays constant amid the chaos. No matter how many times they morph the material world, no matter how many different situations the test subjects are dropped into, and no matter how many times a person's memory is wiped and toyed with one thing stays the same. Love. The only thing in the movie that Murdoch is ever sure of is his love for a woman that is supposedly his wife. This is evident in the scene where Murdoch and his wife talk through telephone receivers and Murdoch is not sure whether they are married, or even whether they had ever met before the the other night. What he is sure of is his love for her. Throguh this scene the director expresses that true love is the nature of the soul and it is the very thing the aliens are looking to understand in order to save their species.
It can be argued that Murdoch's love for her is purely a result of the memories imprinted into him by the aliens, but I believe the dialogue in the film between Murdoch and his wife shows that he is positive about his feelings toward her.
You've certainly gotten to the central theme of this film without any coaching from me. That's very impressive. A dystopian universe? Impressive phraseology, but I'm not sure it fits exactly. I'd say more of a demonic universe. This place is a nightmare, pun intended.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the correction. i looked it up and a dystopia is a place usually in the future that has a totalitarian government. time does not exist in this place, or as they said in the movie they have combined all the times of their history into one place.
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