In the long run, books are better than movies, for the imagination is not constrained by technology or any other physical restraints. Books are also, unlike movies, much cheaper to produce, and so are not forced into a formula that has been determined by Hollywood to provide massive pay-back. But one usually doesn't share the reading of books, except with children. Reading is a solitary adventure, while watching movies is a group experience. And so this weekend, I turned again to the group experience, expecting little more than just that, and maybe a few grimaces and laughs.
The low-level expectation was greatly increased by the genre of the movie we were to watch- a sci fi, often the worst of the worst. Called "The Edge of Tomorrow," it was a film made not long ago, about two years, that I had suspiciously never heard of. When, just before playing, we saw that it starred Tom Cruise, we all groaned - if such a star had not made the headlines, the movie had to be a dog.
But luck was with us, again, as it had been the week before. It was not only a good movie, but a very good movie, and could have been great had it not taken an occasional bow to stereotyped screenwriting. In it, the Earth had been invaded by a species that rode in on asteroids to do what it had been programmed to do - dominate other worlds. Just as, say, a tiger is made to hunt, this form of life was made to conquer. Further, virus-like, it knew the DNA of its victims intimately. And even more than that, we come to learn that it knew both the past and future of its victims. Because of this, it could not lose.
The premise for our hero, Tom Cruise, was great; he is first presented to us as a pretty-boy major in the army, who worked only as a PR man. He was a coward who thought only of himself, and when a general told him he was going to the front lines, Tom tried to black mail him. For this he was tazed - and woke up in handcuffs, demoted to private, forced to engage the enemy in the first wave on the beaches of France. He knows nothing about fighting, and within minutes on the beach, he is killed. But then, he is alive again, and back in handcuffs waiting to be delivered to his front-line squad. What, we ask? Was that battle sequence only a dream?
No - we find that he, along with a beautiful woman (of course) had been sprayed with the blood of one of the uber- aliens, the one in 6 million who had direct contact with the omega, the brain of the aliens. We find that most of the aliens acted as cells, but a few acted as major organs or glands, with direct feedback with the brain. In their DNA was the workings of the brain - and Cruise and the beautiful women had been injected with this encrypted knowledge through the blood of the ubers at the point of death. It is here that they discover that the brain can re-make time, going back to correct errors until it gets it just right and wins. Thus Cruise and the woman, on death, keep going back to the time of the beginning of the sequences that led to death, just as the alien brain would. We find, then, that both he and the woman are competing directly with the brain, which knows every future they will have - and increasingly, vice-versa. They must somehow outsmart this brain, in their own multiple rebirths, by going beyond its capacity to compensate through time.
Yes - don't look to theoretical physics anytime soon for a more thorough explanation. Still, the movie raises all sorts of questions, about reincarnation, about character development, about self-sacrifice and morality. Centrally, it plays upon the development of the anti-hero into the hero, a time-honored script that we have always enjoyed. But, whether the writer or writers were aware of it or not, it goes further into the myth of the hero - it goes beyond the development of heroic qualities to the difficulty of overcoming fears that all of us have in a variety of situations. For in the final analysis, our most potent enemy is the brain against the brain, for the bad (or alien) brain knows all there is to know about the potentially good (human) brain. It is us; it is all of us, who must fight ourselves to rise above an infectious cowardice that is indelible .
Among pre-literate societies, it seems that cowardice existed (and for a few, still exists) as an entity outside the self, as an alien spirit that invades. Otherwise, these people, at least to us (myself included) seemed to not have fear as we know it. They climbed cliffs, walked on wavering bridges or logs across ravines, hunted whales from kayaks, and sailed across unknown seas in small outriggers, all apparently without fear. But we of today have collapsed those demons into ourselves, so that each action is susceptible to them, as a part of our own brain (as we envision it). So we not only fear, say, the sword at our throat, but public speaking, walking on the edge of our roofs, being alone in the dark - any number of things. The demon is always within, telling us we will fail.
I myself had to follow Indians for several days of hiking through slick mountains, where a very pregnant woman loaded with household goods would walk as heedlessly on logs over ravines as a squirrel - while this "hero" had to shimmy across on his crotch, to the endless mirth of the Indians. True, it was slick and I wore shoes, but many of us have confronted narrow ledges along cliffs where we theoretically should be able to walk - but we can't, for fear. It is no fantasy, either; chances are, we would be so quaking with fear half way through that we would fall, a victim to our own negative selves.
This is, and probably always has been, the hero's story; in the past, it was to overcome dragons; in the present, it is to overcome the dragons in ourselves, but they have always been the same beasts, externalized or internalized. How, we have to ask, do we get past ourselves? As the myths go, apparently only through a cleansing of ourselves, down to the root.
But there is more: why do we have this negative self? In my way of thinking, the primitives had a better explanation than our psychologists - that these forces were external, were demons or dragons, for what good would they otherwise have?
For Tom Cruise, the aliens were a single external intelligent virus-like group entity, which exists like any virus does, just to live. We are never told why a good god would make such an entity, so harmful to humans. But the myths tell us why - so that we might find absolute courage; find the will to live and to do the right thing in the face of death without flinching. For death is, for us all, an inescapable challenge, and this courage is, in the end, crucial. Such it seems that this myth is more real than any other so-called real thing,a tale of the one universal, inescapable truth.
Obviously, then, that is the point of the evil mind - to force us to have courage. Like Lancelot, courage can then take us anywhere - to follow our moral principles to the end, and to die in selfless heroics. Just as Tom Cruise does, but I don't want to ruin the ending. FK
The low-level expectation was greatly increased by the genre of the movie we were to watch- a sci fi, often the worst of the worst. Called "The Edge of Tomorrow," it was a film made not long ago, about two years, that I had suspiciously never heard of. When, just before playing, we saw that it starred Tom Cruise, we all groaned - if such a star had not made the headlines, the movie had to be a dog.
But luck was with us, again, as it had been the week before. It was not only a good movie, but a very good movie, and could have been great had it not taken an occasional bow to stereotyped screenwriting. In it, the Earth had been invaded by a species that rode in on asteroids to do what it had been programmed to do - dominate other worlds. Just as, say, a tiger is made to hunt, this form of life was made to conquer. Further, virus-like, it knew the DNA of its victims intimately. And even more than that, we come to learn that it knew both the past and future of its victims. Because of this, it could not lose.
The premise for our hero, Tom Cruise, was great; he is first presented to us as a pretty-boy major in the army, who worked only as a PR man. He was a coward who thought only of himself, and when a general told him he was going to the front lines, Tom tried to black mail him. For this he was tazed - and woke up in handcuffs, demoted to private, forced to engage the enemy in the first wave on the beaches of France. He knows nothing about fighting, and within minutes on the beach, he is killed. But then, he is alive again, and back in handcuffs waiting to be delivered to his front-line squad. What, we ask? Was that battle sequence only a dream?
No - we find that he, along with a beautiful woman (of course) had been sprayed with the blood of one of the uber- aliens, the one in 6 million who had direct contact with the omega, the brain of the aliens. We find that most of the aliens acted as cells, but a few acted as major organs or glands, with direct feedback with the brain. In their DNA was the workings of the brain - and Cruise and the beautiful women had been injected with this encrypted knowledge through the blood of the ubers at the point of death. It is here that they discover that the brain can re-make time, going back to correct errors until it gets it just right and wins. Thus Cruise and the woman, on death, keep going back to the time of the beginning of the sequences that led to death, just as the alien brain would. We find, then, that both he and the woman are competing directly with the brain, which knows every future they will have - and increasingly, vice-versa. They must somehow outsmart this brain, in their own multiple rebirths, by going beyond its capacity to compensate through time.
Yes - don't look to theoretical physics anytime soon for a more thorough explanation. Still, the movie raises all sorts of questions, about reincarnation, about character development, about self-sacrifice and morality. Centrally, it plays upon the development of the anti-hero into the hero, a time-honored script that we have always enjoyed. But, whether the writer or writers were aware of it or not, it goes further into the myth of the hero - it goes beyond the development of heroic qualities to the difficulty of overcoming fears that all of us have in a variety of situations. For in the final analysis, our most potent enemy is the brain against the brain, for the bad (or alien) brain knows all there is to know about the potentially good (human) brain. It is us; it is all of us, who must fight ourselves to rise above an infectious cowardice that is indelible .
Among pre-literate societies, it seems that cowardice existed (and for a few, still exists) as an entity outside the self, as an alien spirit that invades. Otherwise, these people, at least to us (myself included) seemed to not have fear as we know it. They climbed cliffs, walked on wavering bridges or logs across ravines, hunted whales from kayaks, and sailed across unknown seas in small outriggers, all apparently without fear. But we of today have collapsed those demons into ourselves, so that each action is susceptible to them, as a part of our own brain (as we envision it). So we not only fear, say, the sword at our throat, but public speaking, walking on the edge of our roofs, being alone in the dark - any number of things. The demon is always within, telling us we will fail.
I myself had to follow Indians for several days of hiking through slick mountains, where a very pregnant woman loaded with household goods would walk as heedlessly on logs over ravines as a squirrel - while this "hero" had to shimmy across on his crotch, to the endless mirth of the Indians. True, it was slick and I wore shoes, but many of us have confronted narrow ledges along cliffs where we theoretically should be able to walk - but we can't, for fear. It is no fantasy, either; chances are, we would be so quaking with fear half way through that we would fall, a victim to our own negative selves.
This is, and probably always has been, the hero's story; in the past, it was to overcome dragons; in the present, it is to overcome the dragons in ourselves, but they have always been the same beasts, externalized or internalized. How, we have to ask, do we get past ourselves? As the myths go, apparently only through a cleansing of ourselves, down to the root.
But there is more: why do we have this negative self? In my way of thinking, the primitives had a better explanation than our psychologists - that these forces were external, were demons or dragons, for what good would they otherwise have?
For Tom Cruise, the aliens were a single external intelligent virus-like group entity, which exists like any virus does, just to live. We are never told why a good god would make such an entity, so harmful to humans. But the myths tell us why - so that we might find absolute courage; find the will to live and to do the right thing in the face of death without flinching. For death is, for us all, an inescapable challenge, and this courage is, in the end, crucial. Such it seems that this myth is more real than any other so-called real thing,a tale of the one universal, inescapable truth.
Obviously, then, that is the point of the evil mind - to force us to have courage. Like Lancelot, courage can then take us anywhere - to follow our moral principles to the end, and to die in selfless heroics. Just as Tom Cruise does, but I don't want to ruin the ending. FK
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