The showing I saw last week had a Q&A session with Jon Ronson, who is an interesting guy. Quite a few of the questions were about a recent article about the current dispute between Ronson and John Sergeant, which he couldn’t talk about but did seem very upset by.
He did say that he liked the film, and was quite glad that it hadn’t included much of the darker half of the book, as there was no way to balance the humour of movie with, well, torture.
I’d be interested in reading the book, but I’d also quite like to have a look at some of the documentaries that he and Sargeant did prior to writing the book.
I thought the movie was all about redemption, forgiveness, and freedom. I don’t think it was a story, as such, at all – I thought that it was trying to convey a message.
Freedom was for the goats and the prisoners Forgiveness was for the characters themselves, such as Clooney forgiving himself for killing a goat and McGregor forgiving his wife. Redemption was for the idea of psychic powers themselves, or for the powers of the mind. That was the final scene of the movie – saving psychic powers from hurting others and freeing it for use by the main character. Spacey was also redeemed as he gave up his fight against Clooney.
I think if you judged the movie on the story alone it comes off pretty poor, as it meanders and wavers in focus, but if you look at the overarching themes it’s pretty clear what the movie was all about. Just look at the repetition of the “dark side” idea, and how it covers killing, and the treatment of the prisoners, and possibly the military itself.
I have to say though that I thought ordering the soldiers to think freely was a very nice ironic touch. Saluting the mother earth…that killed me
First of all they gave a shout-out to my adopted hometown, Ann Arbor, Michigan, baby! People who have never lived in Ann Arbor probably missed the subtext that it is the kind of place where a psychic warrior would live. My god do we have some hippies.
I giggled pretty much the whole way through. I definitely felt the whole tone of the film was meant to be extremely skeptical of the psychic warriors. The successes in the story was told through the massive confirmation bias-warped mind of Clooney’s character.
I absolutely loved the way the film was directed. And Clooney was great. And McGregor hot as usual. I wasn’t expecting all the eye candy; that was a pleasant surprise.
I interpreted the film through my own existential lens. Viktor Frankl has said that what matters most isn’t the meaning of a man’s life in general, but rather what his life means to him at a given moment. I thought Lyn’s devout mission and how it came to mean something to Ewan’s character was a perfect example of that. Whether it’s objectively real or not doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it meant something to those men, at that exact moment.
I thought the last scene of the film didn’t fit at all. As mentioned above, I wondered why they didn’t just fade to black at the last second. That would have fit much better with the overall tone of the movie.
The last scene did baffle me, which was part of my “was the movie consistent in tone?” questions earlier. I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to mean. I’m still not sure really.
Fading to black, but hearing a WHACK and “ow!” would’ve been the perfect way to end it IMO.
Very unfortunately timed, I felt, what with the movie premiering right around the time of the Fort Hood shootings. The theater was a lot of nervous laughter at this point.
I liked the movie overall, and was really digging Jeff Bridges’ parts (“this could never fly in the military [laugh]”/“this is so true [laugh]”), but the last act felt like they were running out of time and decided to wrap things up with a lot of hippie bullshit. Most of the movies was fun hippie bullshit, but just when it felt like they were about to get into another hour of movietime instead they --well, they lost me there.
