I saw **Minority Report ** this weekend and found it very thought provoking on many different levels (as well as laden with product placement ads.)
The underlying messages that *I * gleened from it were:
1)** Capital Punishiment is wrong.** If we execute someone for their crime and find out years later that we (the state/system) was wrong, there is no way to rectify the situation because the situation is now deader than a door knob.
There is always a choice. This is a very good message to get out there, no matter how subtle.
**Shop at Gap **
YMMV
Anyone else get the underlying/hidden message agenda in other films?
The World According to Garp – women are stupid, venal, untrustworthy bitches, and the only good woman is one that had been born a man. A rather surprising message for a film that was considered so feminist at the time.
Mr. Deeds (among many others) – No one ever lost money underestimating the taste of the American public.
I don’t usually look for meaning or symbolism in movies. It’s like explaining a joke. You get it or you don’t, but if you missed the symbolism in Bladerunner, you need to have your eyeballs revoked.
IT’S A PLASTIC BAG! IT IS BEAUTIFUL! LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL! LIFE IS A PLASTIC BAG! I AM DEEP AND MEANINGFUL, JUST LIKE THIS PLASTIC BAG! IN CASE YOU DIDN’T GET THE POINT BEFORE, THIS PLASTIC BAG, LIKE LIFE, IS BEAUTIFUL! WORSHIP THE PLASTIC BAG!!!
“Pretty Woman”: Prostitution is a great career, where you get to stay at luxury hotels, shop on Rodeo Drive, and marry Donald Trump.
“The English Patient”: Romance is far more important than defeating Naziism. The problems of the world don’t amount to a hill of beans, next to Ralph Fiennes’ love life.
“The Piano”: only unreasonable, oppressive, brutish men object when their wives play around behind their backs.
“Hannibal”: it’s much better to be a serial killer than to be rude or sexist.
Blade: Swords are cool.
Blade II: Sequals sell.
MibII: Ditto.
Hmm. David Brin wrote several severly critical articles of Star Wars critizing the new midichlorians for making the force into an elitist wossname and turning the Star wars universe from egalitarian into a high aristocracy. My HTML-fu isn’t up to finding and linking to it, though.
Fight Club was loaded with messages, though I’m not certain they were all that hidden. I’m not sure I could sum any of them up in a few words, but the one most realized was the hypocritical and paradoxical nature of their little club, as well as the anti-ideas it was founded on (no one special, except for Mr Durden, for example; “Is that what a man looks like?” when that is exactly what Brad Pitt looks like; and so on). As a surface rejection of commercialism, it sort of paints commercialism to be a tar-baby rather than something that can actually be avoided. Everyone, even your own self, sells you down the river. :shrug: One of many messages, IMO. But even that pessemistic message is in conflict with some others (the ending, for one, is more or less completely happy: narrator is ok, Marla is back, Project Mayhem’s plan was successful, and so on).
Minority Report: we all have a choice? Hmm… I’m not sure I got that. The only people who could choose were those who had access to the pre-cogs’ visions of the future in the first place. I loved this movie, btw, and I remain unclear at the end whether Cruise’s character was happy that pre-crime was over or not (it didn’t seem to be shown either way). His, “Why did you catch the ball?” speech is a great one.
A.I.: grrr, this one, too, is rather crowded, but given the emotions it was meant (and did for me) to elicit, there is a strong notion of the truth of the Turing Test. What struck me was Joe’s cry to David: “I am. I was!” Also, that the movie focused on a robot child and ended with a robot race decended from those self-same efforts also says something to me remeniscent of Kurzweil’s opinions on how humans will evolve in the future: by embracing (in a rather literal sense) technology. AI is going to be the human race’s child, so to speak. What I can’t gather is whether AI is meant to be better or just different; I remain unclear on whether David really experiences love.
