This Saturday I decided to kick back and watch a movie. Most are wastes of time and I usually find myself angry for having lost those two hours of my life, but reading is solitaire; in movies, we share, and so I decided to take the chance again. We had been given a free weekend of HBO and surely there must be something good on. There was, but it was not what I expected at all.
I cannot quite recall the title (I believe it was "Prisoners"), but the introductory blurb said it was about children stolen by crazies and a father's over-the-top antics to get them back. It seemed like a rehash of the "Taken" movie, where our ex-CIA hero kicks slimy oil sheikh butt and gets his girl back JUST BEFORE the "fate worse than death." "Taken" was a predictable Hollywood big seller, with the righteous getting even against a foe that it is politically correct to hate, and I expected - and wanted- the same. Easy, satisfying, good triumphs evil and all that.
We did not get it, though, and how. The girls (about ten years old) are taken, apparently by someone in a camper, and we are surprised to have the police find the camper in the beginning minutes. When the camper tries to escape and runs into a tree, we are left wondering - what next for the next 2 hours? They got their guy. Oddly, in a movie filled with creative twists, they both did and didn't. The 'guy" turns out to be a young man with a 10-year-old mentality who seems all the world like a handicapped innocent. We meet his aunt who is raising him at her shabby home and find she had adopted him after his parents died and her own child died of cancer. I cannot detail the movie much more, as it is complex and would take too much space, but it turns out that the Aunt is an absolutely evil person who has vowed vengeance on God for taking her child by forming a fiendish cult made up of bizarre misfits who steal children and bring them to her - where she toys (mostly psychologically) with them before they are killed. This is done, she claims towards the end, to turn good people into hateful people who not only injure God with their hate, but often come to curse God as she does. By stealing children, the parents often do the unthinkable to get them back - and indeed, the father of one of the girls captures the handicapped 'kid' and tortures him for the answers (which we find he has. We feel sorry for him, but he is holding back the info even as the girls are to be killed). The cop on the case also resorts to violence. And at one point, it is discovered that a Catholic priest has left a man in an abandoned coal cellar bound in duct tape, where he dies because he confessed to kidnapping and killing 16 children. Even a priest, then, was brought to horrible deeds and deep sin because of the Aunt's plan (the man duct-tapped was part of her cult).
From the start, we find that the father who goes on the warpath is a very religious man. The movie begins with he and his son deer hunting as he says the Lord's Prayer. This he later recites with tears in his eyes as he tortures the disabled man, choking on the words, "and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." He knows what he is doing is wrong, but right, too - his girl was taken by evil and the immature man has the key - he just KNOWS it.
The movie does not end tragically as we have come to suspect. Certain clues and incidences arise, which towards the end seem miraculous in an ordinary way - synchronicities that save the girls and searcher involved, while dispatching the evil Aunt. We vaguely sense, then, that God is working to help the innocents and the believers. Yet -where was God before? What of the 16 children stolen and killed before, and the unimaginable heartache and devastation that was brought to their parents?
The movie was far, far better than "Taken" in every way, but it is easy to see why few know of it. It does not lead us to the pre-rehearsed conclusion that we wish. The big questions are left dangling in the murky air: why does God permit such evil to innocents? Should we not hate God for this ourselves? Or is it our own evil, which these actions bring out, that curses us? Are we part of a sinful world, where universal forgiveness must be achieved before we can live in the light and love of God? All, we see, are attached to each other in violence and hate. As one body, mustn't we first eliminate that stain before we can expect divine love?
The ending ensures the viewers that it is right to believe that there is a god; this is not a film of atheism, but of those questioning God's nature, and ours. And so it must be for the Quiet Voice: for this writer, with 60 years now gone, has seen the shocking suffering of too many, as most have of my age. This is no Pollyanish New Age we live in where the horrors of the past are now banished. Some of the authors reviewed here seem to think so - or brush away the evil with some evolutionary scheme of enlightenment. This does not mean that they are wrong in a larger sense, but we, living right here and now, are this world's boots on the ground. We might hear the propaganda from this side or that, but we know the truth, for we live this "war" as does everyone else, and with time our shared truth cannot be covered up. Evil and suffering exist. And yet, as those who truly reflect know, so does God, and God is and can only be Love in the final totality. We strain to understand how this might be. As such we will continue here and maybe, with the non-miracle of miraculous fortune or synchronicity, we will be given enough of an answer. FK
I cannot quite recall the title (I believe it was "Prisoners"), but the introductory blurb said it was about children stolen by crazies and a father's over-the-top antics to get them back. It seemed like a rehash of the "Taken" movie, where our ex-CIA hero kicks slimy oil sheikh butt and gets his girl back JUST BEFORE the "fate worse than death." "Taken" was a predictable Hollywood big seller, with the righteous getting even against a foe that it is politically correct to hate, and I expected - and wanted- the same. Easy, satisfying, good triumphs evil and all that.
We did not get it, though, and how. The girls (about ten years old) are taken, apparently by someone in a camper, and we are surprised to have the police find the camper in the beginning minutes. When the camper tries to escape and runs into a tree, we are left wondering - what next for the next 2 hours? They got their guy. Oddly, in a movie filled with creative twists, they both did and didn't. The 'guy" turns out to be a young man with a 10-year-old mentality who seems all the world like a handicapped innocent. We meet his aunt who is raising him at her shabby home and find she had adopted him after his parents died and her own child died of cancer. I cannot detail the movie much more, as it is complex and would take too much space, but it turns out that the Aunt is an absolutely evil person who has vowed vengeance on God for taking her child by forming a fiendish cult made up of bizarre misfits who steal children and bring them to her - where she toys (mostly psychologically) with them before they are killed. This is done, she claims towards the end, to turn good people into hateful people who not only injure God with their hate, but often come to curse God as she does. By stealing children, the parents often do the unthinkable to get them back - and indeed, the father of one of the girls captures the handicapped 'kid' and tortures him for the answers (which we find he has. We feel sorry for him, but he is holding back the info even as the girls are to be killed). The cop on the case also resorts to violence. And at one point, it is discovered that a Catholic priest has left a man in an abandoned coal cellar bound in duct tape, where he dies because he confessed to kidnapping and killing 16 children. Even a priest, then, was brought to horrible deeds and deep sin because of the Aunt's plan (the man duct-tapped was part of her cult).
From the start, we find that the father who goes on the warpath is a very religious man. The movie begins with he and his son deer hunting as he says the Lord's Prayer. This he later recites with tears in his eyes as he tortures the disabled man, choking on the words, "and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." He knows what he is doing is wrong, but right, too - his girl was taken by evil and the immature man has the key - he just KNOWS it.
The movie does not end tragically as we have come to suspect. Certain clues and incidences arise, which towards the end seem miraculous in an ordinary way - synchronicities that save the girls and searcher involved, while dispatching the evil Aunt. We vaguely sense, then, that God is working to help the innocents and the believers. Yet -where was God before? What of the 16 children stolen and killed before, and the unimaginable heartache and devastation that was brought to their parents?
The movie was far, far better than "Taken" in every way, but it is easy to see why few know of it. It does not lead us to the pre-rehearsed conclusion that we wish. The big questions are left dangling in the murky air: why does God permit such evil to innocents? Should we not hate God for this ourselves? Or is it our own evil, which these actions bring out, that curses us? Are we part of a sinful world, where universal forgiveness must be achieved before we can live in the light and love of God? All, we see, are attached to each other in violence and hate. As one body, mustn't we first eliminate that stain before we can expect divine love?
The ending ensures the viewers that it is right to believe that there is a god; this is not a film of atheism, but of those questioning God's nature, and ours. And so it must be for the Quiet Voice: for this writer, with 60 years now gone, has seen the shocking suffering of too many, as most have of my age. This is no Pollyanish New Age we live in where the horrors of the past are now banished. Some of the authors reviewed here seem to think so - or brush away the evil with some evolutionary scheme of enlightenment. This does not mean that they are wrong in a larger sense, but we, living right here and now, are this world's boots on the ground. We might hear the propaganda from this side or that, but we know the truth, for we live this "war" as does everyone else, and with time our shared truth cannot be covered up. Evil and suffering exist. And yet, as those who truly reflect know, so does God, and God is and can only be Love in the final totality. We strain to understand how this might be. As such we will continue here and maybe, with the non-miracle of miraculous fortune or synchronicity, we will be given enough of an answer. FK
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