Let’s face it, Hollywood has overdone this genre and then some but that’s not the issue. While watching Nicholas Cage’s “The Family Man” something really got to me. (Wow, the IMDB lists a lot of films with that title.)
Cage’s alternate life comes complete with 2 kids. In particular, one really great little daughter. Then Don Cheadle’s character “Cash” sends Cage back to his regular life and those kids are gone. Excuse me, hasn’t Cash committed murder? These were real live flesh and blood kids and now they don’t exist. This is one heinous crime.
So anyway, almost all of these films come off as criminal to me now (as well as unoriginal). (I don’t think “Sliding Doors” commits murder. But then that is a simultaneous thread form where the two threads have to sync up. If a character goes away in one, he would also have to go in the other.)
Well, if it helps, my mom came up with the theory that after Nicholas and Tea hook up again, the children they’d have together later in their lives would turn out to be their kids from the “Alternate” reality, just born later than in the alternate reality. Since the alternate reality was created with supernatural means (And by a benevolent force), not technological means, there’s a better chance of the “happy ending” not having any hideous Twilight Zone-esque caveats.
Of course, that would start messing around with issues of logic and chaos theory, not to mention free will and the existence of a soul. <Homer Simpson catchphrase> But hey, what are you going to do. <Homer Simpson catchphrase>
Ranchoth
(Incurable geek and fanboy, extraordinare.)
Ah, but this is where it gets tricky. In the alternate reality, Cage had these 2 kids. What the movie didn’t show you is that one time the family was getting in a taxi but both kids slipped out of their parents grasps which caused the family to miss the taxi. A man took the taxi while Cage and Leoni had their backs turned.
The few seconds that the taxi was delayed while the passenger switch occured resulted in the taxi pulling out right in front of a road paver resulting in the deaths of the driver and passenger.
So, when Don Cheadle sent Cage back to his real life, he may have killed off the two kids but he simultaneously brought the driver and passenger back to life. Really, it’s all just a miracle of modern science.
But who says it’s fantasy? To Cage it was reality for what, two weeks? This was a living breathing girl to him. Okay, you can write off an our or so of Weird Stuff to a bad dream. Several hours to the brown acid. But it went on day after day. It wouldn’t seem like a fantasy to anyone who experienced it. Especially since nothing otherwise weird or dreamlike happened until he ran into Cash at the QuickStop.
If I spend a couple weeks somewhere else and met several really swell people and later realized those people ceased to exist, I would feel bad. Cage had come to fall in love with his kids. (His sense of missing them, and Tea, was key for the last part of the film.)
Wouldn’t Cage be the murderer, since it was him that ended the relationship with Tea (HOW do i type accented a?) and made the kids never happen, he commited involuntary manslaughter.