Purandara's Reviews
 

The Seventh Seal


For a reviewer, there is often nothing so difficult as returning to a long-time personal favorite and trying to do it justice, objectively and without indulging in the sort of rapturous fanboy antics that make reading internet commentary such a chore. With that in mind, I have decided to skip the "objectivity" part and go straight to the rapture and the fanboyism. Read on at your own peril.

The Seventh Seal is the greatest achievement in the history of cinema. There. I said it. No ifs, ands, buts, hems, haws or prevarications. Period. Final. That's ****in' all, folks. (Which, I suppose means I'll have to get around to moving Rashomon from 1B. to 2 on my all-time list, but a little change never hurt anyone.)

Interestingly, there was a time when one could make that very statement without precipitating fits of eyebrow raising, condescending looks or, most often, the sort of blank incomprehension you might expect after name-dropping Derrida at a Bush family dinner. There are, I suppose, historical reasons for this. For starters, there was a time when people didn't feel free to proffer their views about film on the operating theory that owning Fight Club made them a real movie expert.

Beyond that, The Seventh Seal is a film of ideas. Stark ideas. Dark ideas. Ideas about life and death, meaning and emptiness, heroism, cowardice and the silence of God. We unfortunately live in a diminished age. Many of us grew up with a sheltered complacency and groped about a world where abortion and gay marriage seemed vexing enough questions. As a result, the profundity of the existential questions is lost. They seem naive at best, arrogant at worst.

But for an earlier generation, the big questions were not so easily dismissed. How could they be? They gazed every day over the precipice into the nuclear abyss. Most people alive in 1957 had lived through the cataclysmic nightmare that had pulled stone from stone in a matter of less than a decade an edifice of belief 200 years in the making. Many were still living, literally, in the rubble left behind. The feral, gnawing doubt at the heart of The Seventh Seal spoke loudly and clearly to that generation. And maybe, in the brave new world that has emerged in the wake of 9/11, it can speak to a new generation. I fervently hope it does, because The Seventh Seal is one of those great works of art that demands experiencing.


The Seventh Seal is high-impact cinema in the most significant sense possible, and every frame staggers under the apocalyptic weight of the search for meaning. The story is simple – a 14th Century knight (the incomparable Max von Sydow) and his nihilistically cynical squire (Gunnar Björnstrand) return to plague ravaged Sweden and make their way back home after a decade of fighting the Crusades – and the film’s structure is equally straightforward in its linearity, but extraordinary in the terrible certainty to which it inevitably moves. Director Ingmar Bergman’s mastery was at its peak The Seventh Seal, and his own stern upbringing and existential insecurities made him uniquely suited for reconstructing and reinterpreting the doomed march of medieval morality plays for a world that saw itself on the brink of a new Armageddon.


The Seventh Seal is a triumph of cinematic formalism, and the heart of its power lies in its startling (even after decades of parodies) imagery and the dark poetry of its visuals. The film’s master metaphor is introduced at the outset. Sydow’s Antonius Block wakes upon a beach where he and his squire Jöns have washed ashore. There, he finds the black-clad figure of Death (Bengt Ekerot) waiting for them. He challenges Death to a game of chess, with his life on the line. What follows is one of the most famous frames in film history. Block and Death face each other across the board, silhouetted against a dark, raging sea and sky. Sydow’s face is almost completely in the shadows, his sharp features made indistinct by the gloom. Only Death seems fully real (despite his fantastic appearance), his face is well lit and draws the eye with the same inevitability with which he reaps his victims. This game is continued intermittently throughout The Seventh Seal, though we know from the beginning how it must end.

The rest of film is taken up by two journeys. Block and his squire must traverse a land wracked by plague and torn by fear. Along the way, they encounter signposts of a world in crisis and decay: flagellants marching through the streets, whipping themselves in atonement for sin, a fearful young girl tortured and burned as a witch, and the priest whose honeyed words convinced Block to take up the Cross, an opportunist who Jöns prevents from raping a seemingly mute woman (Gunnel Lindblom). They also add to their party, as they are joined by the mute and a pair of traveling players (Nils Poppe and Bibi Andersson) and their infant son.


However, it is the second, spiritual journey that forms the true center of the film. The Seventh Seal is, at its heart, about the search for meaning in a world where only Death is real. Jöns and Block represent two opposing approaches to problem of meaning. Block desperately wants the comfort of belief, but cannot bring himself to it in the face of the evidence of his senses. His squire, on the other hand, neither has belief nor seeks it. Jöns is rather a Sartrean figure, reveling in the very absurdity and meaninglessness that Block recoils from. The interplay between the two (both directly and in the omniscient eye of the camera) and between Block and the cloaked figure of Death form the primary subtext of The Seventh Seal. Will Block (and through him, the viewing audience) achieve some sort of satisfactory understanding before the inevitable triumph of Death?


The answer is as enigmatic as the the film itself. Block does indeed seize fragments of meaning and purpose. In particular, he finds something both worth living for and worth dying for in sharing the simple joys of wild strawberries (a favorite Bergman image) and a spring afternoon with Jof (Poppe), his wife Mia (Andersson) and young son. Indeed, it is through this beautiful young family that Block finally fulfills his duty and destiny as a warrior, dragging out his chess match with Death just long enough to allow them to escape the Reaper’s scythe under cover of storm and darkness.


And yet, when his own end comes, Block remains defiant, insistent that it should not have come with so many questions still left unanswered. His plaintive prayers seem all the more pathetic next to the dark acceptance of Jöns. From a distant hill, Jof, ever prone to apocalyptic visions, witnesses the final march of the doomed. He watches as Block and his companions gyrate wildly in an ecstatic procession behind Death, describing the scene to his wife. “And the strict master Death bids them dance.” He then smiles ruefully, turns and leads his family into the rising sun, toward life in the living, but ever cognizant of the fate that lies both behind and ahead.


10/10

Adding an earlier review to keep these all in one place...

Youth of the Beast

Seijun Suzuki is one of the more polarizing and ambiguous figures in Japanese cinema. Genius? Madman? Something in between? Perhaps it doesn't matter, the differences between these positions are in any case, quite sleight. An amazingly prolific director - he directed over forty films in the 1960s alone - his very productivity helped lend credibility to those who dismissed him as B-movie man, preeminent among these to be sure, but a B-movie man nonetheless. In recent years, however, his work has been increasingly appreciated, particularly in the West.

In large measure, this uptick in esteem is can be traced to the film industry finally catching up to Suzuki. His classic mid-60s films (Youth of the Beast, Gate of Flesh, Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill) featured a powerful combination of brutal, explicit and often sadistic violence, morbid humor, a keen sense of the ridiculous and a visual and narrative style that is fractured and often hallucinatory, all held together (or, rather, defiantly not held together) by a totalizing nihilism that denies any higher or greater meaning to actions beyond the demonstratable consequences of action itself. This made for cinema that, at the time, was incomprehensible to many viewers, and Suzuki was famously fired by Nikkatsu in 1967 for making films that "make no sense and make no money." Decades later, however, the potency of his best films is keenly appreciated by many cinephiles raised on Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers (both almost completely derivative of Suzuki's work).

Suzuki himself identified Youth of the Beast as marking the beginning of his most creatively fertile period, and all the distinctive elements of his filmmaking are in evidence, and meshing perfectly. The basic story - a mysterious tough muscles into the center of a war between rival gangs, then begins pursuing ends of his own as he plays each off the other - is strongly reminiscent of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, but where Yojimbo is a period piece set in a down and out town of the Edo period, Youth of the Beast is a (post)modern gangster film set in contemporary (1960s) Tokyo. Mifune's iconic role as the amoral ronin Sanjuro Kuwabatake is here filled by Jo Shishido as disgraced ex-detective Joji 'Jo' Mizuno.

The film opens with police investigating the apparent double suicide of a detective and his mistress (we later learn that it was actually a double murder). The initial sequence plays at being a traditional police procedural, with middle aged men in rumpled suits and worn hats speaking clinically of the dead. The camera pans to a table and an incongruous splash of color, a single cut red flower in a vase. It is an image of fleeting life that is repeated as the film's closing frame.

Suddenly, the film jumps to full color with a blast of hard bop from the soundtrack, cutting to a crowded street in Tokyo and the maniacal laughter of a woman. The camera soon finds 'Jo' Shisado, who explodes into violent action, attacking three men, pummeling one of them to the ground and kicking him repeatedly before fastidiously wiping the blood from his shoe onto the fallen man's shirt. He then turns with an air of total indifference and strolls into a hostess bar.

His outburst provides an entree into the Tokyo underworld; the men he thrashed were low-level yakuza soldiers, and the ease with which he dispatched them attracts the attention of the local underboss. Soon, he meets the big boss, Hideo Nomoto, and becomes a hitman for Nomoto's gang. It rapidly becomes apparent that Jo is playing a deeper game. He forces his way into the office of Nomoto's chief rival, earning a place on his payroll as well, this time by providing intelligence on Nomoto's activities. He plays the rivals off one another, eventually achieving the cataclysmic annihilation of both gangs.

But why? We learn through flashbacks and his own admission that Jo is a former cop,framed by the yakuza and sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. More significantly, it is revealed that the detective whose murder was investigated in the opening scene was his former partner. He knows that someone in Nomoto's gang is responsible for that murder, and he is bent on discovering the killer and dispatching him..but he's not at all particular about who else he kills in the process. The purity of his vengeance is eventually undermined, however, when he befriends one of Nomoto's henchmen, and, particularly, after he learns who the real hand behind the killing was. In the end, his success brings no satisfaction, only more death.

The great strength of Youth of the Beast is its combination of superb visual flair and unremitting nihilism. Suzuki's shots are almost invariably dynamic in their composition, a riot of color and movement against a gritty background of corruption and decay. They create at once a hallucinatory detachment and a gut level immersion in the violence. Even the relatively static shots are intensely poetic and loaded with symbolism. Several scenes take place in the office of Nomoto's hostess bar. The entire back wall of the office is a one-way mirror, looking out into the nightclub. The floor of the office is set below the floor of the club. It is a perfect visual depiction of an "underworld" existing side by side with everyday life, but invisible to most people.

One aspect of the film will likely be extremely disturbing to many contemporary Western viewers. Suzuki's films were often possessed of a violent and virulent misogyny, and this is no exception. The female characters are invariably unsympathetic; prostitutes, addicts and murdering adulteresses. One scene features a pimp humiliating an addicted woman while she begs for a fix. In another, Nomoto beats a call girl with his belt and then rapes her. The movie reaches its climax when Jo leaves the woman who orchestrated the murder of his partner to the tender mercies of a straight razor wielding psychopath. It is a fitting end to one of the most relentlessly violent films of its era.

9/10

As Tears Go By

One of my favorite film viewing pastimes is going back to the early films of some of my favorite directors and getting a feel for where they’ve come from to get to where they are. In the last year or so, Wong Kar-Wai has firmly ensconced himself as my favorite contemporary filmmaker, and tonight, I treated myself to his 1988 debut feature As Tears Go By.

What makes this film fascinating is the startling degree to which Wong’s instinct for visual poetry and his ability to translate the almost physical pain of longing onto the screen are both already finely honed, though the languid pacing and narrative inventiveness of his later works (like undisputed masterpiece In the Mood for Love) are notably absent.

As Tears Go By wears the clothing of a straightforward Hong Kong street opera of the type made famous during the 1980s by John Woo, though Wong also tips the cap to Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. It features swaggering bravado and staccato violence one expects of such fare, and is both Wong’s most accessible film and his only commercial success to date.

As Tears Go By centers on Wah (Andy Lau), an up-and-coming Triad gangster trying to balance his own ambitions against his loyalty to his feckless “little brother” Fly (Jacky Cheung), whose impulsivity represents a constant danger, not only to himself, but to Wah as well (though he also provides an otherwise tense film with much needed humor). Wah’s life is further complicated by a growing love for his cousin Ngor (frequent Wong collaborator Maggie Cheung in her first major dramatic role), a beautiful girl whose existence he was totally unaware of before she came to stay with him while seeking medical treatment in Hong Kong.

Beneath the familiar aspects of genre film, however, lurk the seeds of Wong Kar-Wai’s later mastery. As Tears Go By could have been just another bullet ballet, but it is instead a searing, romantic work of art, despite occasional clichés. Always something of an actor’s director (and famous for leaning heavily on the improvisational talents of his stars, despite his own background as a screenwriter), he coaxes from his cast performances that are uniformly excellent. Jacky Cheung, in particular, stands out, and he imbues Fly with a reckless machismo that only serves to highlight the self-doubt that gnaws at his soul. The Hong Kong Film Awards Best Actor trophy which Cheung won for this role was well-deserved.

But it is Wong Kar-Wai who really dominates As Tears Go By, as the visual and emotional style that characterized his later works is already in evidence. His signature thematic concerns of longing and memory, and the master iconography he associates with these concepts (slow burning cigarettes and torrential downpours, respectively) figure prominently in As Tears Go By, and while his mastery of the basic visual style he introduces in this film would increase with later films, he was already a powerful cinematic poet.

The only elements of his mature style that are missing are the characteristically recursive and self-referential narrative structures of his later work and the constant weight of emotional isolation that so perfectly captures the disassociative rootlessness of modern existence (though the latter is not completely lacking, and is especially apparent in the opening scenes of the movie). This has the effect of slightly lessening the impact of some of the imagery, but it cannot keep As Tears Go By from being an immensely powerful debut film.

8/10

I haven't seen this thread before now. Nice reviews! The Seventh Seal is one of my favourites too...

Well, I'm not a terribly productive writer, otherwise it might have stayed at the top long enough for people to start noticing.

The lengths which many are willing to go to provide some sort of intellectual justification of the existence of Starship Troopers never cease to amaze me. "Oh, it's satire," they say. "It is a subversive send up of fascism, the most brilliant since Dr. Stragelove."

Well folks, I'm not going to go to great lengths at all. There's no need to do more than let the cat out of the bag. No it isn't. Starship Troopers is not subversive. Starship Troopers is not satire. Starship Troopers is just stupid. For all its smirking, in-on-its-own-joke faux camp and oh-so-ironic stabs at social commentary, it is nothing more than a schlocky sci-fi shoot 'em up aimed at adolescents (clearly demonstrating that the filmmakers knew all along that their 'subversive' film was a steaming turd) and directed with all the ham-handed prurience which we've all come to know and hate from Paul Verhoeven (whose chief claim to fame is Showgirls, the movie which ensured that no one would ever be curious enough to see an NC-17 film again).

That's not to say that 'satire' and 'subversion' aren't attempted, just that they fail miserably (and how could they not with Verhoeven at the helm, not to mention a cast of 'stars' headed by the likes of Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards?). Any satirical effect is lost in the stunning lack of context. So there might be a fascist society some time, for some reason at some point in the future, and it might not be pleasant? How interesting. Now get back to machinegunning four-story beetles.

The moral of this story? In the future, Marines will take co-ed showers.

0/10

Yeh, but Micheal Ironside...

Your complaining about a movie whose social context was never intended to be the crux of the movie, but was always ancillary to the film's entire reason for existing: "macheinegunning four-story beetles."

7thson said it perfectly in the other thread, you're complaining the popcorn is too salty. Regardless if it is up to your standards or not, the social jabs are certainly present in Starship Troopers, but to rate the whole film based solely on their attendance in the background and not the film's major intentions - again, blowing up giant bugs - is clearly telling of your agenda.

Starship Troopers is a fantastic, big budget, B-Movie, whether you're trying to **** on the fanboys because you don't like the taste of the popcorn or not.

Bull****. There's a reason the fanboys always cite the 'satirical' intent of the film. If Starship Troopers is just a sci-fi action adventure, then it has NOTHING to recommend it. The story (as told in the film) is totally uninteresting and at times only marginally comprehensible, the acting is uniformly terrible, the battle scenes are poorly choreographed, the effects are mediocre, the direction relies entirely on brute force linearity, the editing is about as obvious as it could possibly be and the film's visual look is about on par with 1980s Saturday morning cartoon show. If there's no satire, no intellectual depth under the surface, then Starship Troopers is one thing and one thing only; a putrid turd of a film.

Micheal Ironside?



Am i his only fan here?

I'm guessing so.

Rue McClanahan is also in it (I think), but you could have cast the greatest talents in history and their acting STILL would have sucked with this material.

Marginally comprehensible? I'm not one for dancing around a topic, so I'll just cut to the chase: do you have a learning disorder?

You may find it uninteresting, but calling it marginally comprehensible is just grabbing in the air for possible insults. A 9 year old could understand everything that happens in Starship Troopers.

The battle scenes may not be revolutionary, but one could hardly call them poorly choreographed. They're actually fairly grounded for an over-the-top sci-fi film and there is always something going on in the background to enjoy (well, obviously not for you, since you're hell bent on ****ting all over it).

The effects are mediocre? Are you kidding? The integration of CGI with full scale models is phenomal, especially given the year it was made and the scale of the sets. If the effects were so mediocre, why were several shots from Starship Troopers used in the original promotional commercials for the high quality visuals that DVDs had to offer? It certainly wasn't because it was such a critical and cultural success...

Which is exactly what B-movies tend to resemble.

Michael Ironside is the ****. He's not a powerful actor by any means, but he has a fun as hell screen presence.

The 'what' is pretty obvious. The 'why' is not always so clear since the filmmakers never got around to providing an adequate backstory to address what should be painfully obvious questions like, "How did the bugs get here?" and "Why would anyone care, since the planet is completely barren?" and "Why did we develop interestellar travel but not weapons more advanced than machine guns?"

Sure you can. Endless waves of cg insects charging haphazardly deployed marines with endless ammunition for 10 minutes at a stretch.

BORING!

How so? Who the hell fights in phalanx when armed with automatic weapons. They're some of the dumbest battle sequences I've ever seen.

Wow, the same 10 rocks appear in almost every seen. Yipee, I'm thrilled.

And seriously man, what's your deal? Did you write the script or something? No need to get hostile just because someone else doesn't like the same movies...

The sets look like something out of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and the bugs look like crap (compare that to the incredible level of realism achieved with Jurassic Park, which was made 4 years earlier, or even with the CG footage from the Star Wars special edition, done at roughly the same time).

That's because it was one of the only major special effects features that was released in DVD format in the early days. You have to keep in mind that there weren't DVD editions of Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Terminator 2 etc. available in 1998, they had to make due with the titles that had been released.

Correct, because 'B-movie' is a euphamism for "Cheap unimaginative crap." Which is perfect, because it's exactly what Starship Troopers is. Congratulations, Paul Verhoeven! You took a $100 million budget and made a $50,000 film out of it. You must be so proud!

Are you really that torn because you weren't privied to such epochal mysteries as to the evolution of a species of giant bugs across the other side of the universe?

The reason for caring about a barren planet was pretty obvious and intentionally silly. They threw a giant rock at earth and killed millions of people. There was no reason to go do it other than as a response of sheer patriotism. I really hate to draw a parallel that was not intentional on the filmmakers part, but if you're arguing as to how none if it made sense without context, I seem to remember a recent war that was started out of nothing but the veil of patriotism. I am not trying to get into a political discussion here, but merely pointing out how misplacing motive is a human trait - past, present and future.

As for technology, there were laser guns. There were tiny nuclear warheads. There were all kinds of things. It's a simple matter of physics that something small and pointy moving very, very fast will **** something up. That is never going to change.

The hatred of the action and effects is simply a matter of taste. Yours are obviously far more sensitive.

I love how often confidence gets confused with hostility. You made it a point to bury the movie as a direct response to fans of it. I'm just a casual fan of the film these days (but I will admit to being a rabid fan in my younger years), but a 0 out of 10 is an obvious attempt at trying to shove it in the face of people who disagree with you.

Touche.

B-movies have adopted a new generational definition of low-budget affairs, but the simple matter of the term means that a studio didn't invest its A game. They were lower tiered directors, actors, scripts, characters etc. They were never misrepresented, just as Starship Troopers was never misrepresented as a beacon of intellectual purity.

You may want to think of them as "cheap, unimaginative crap", but they're not. Evil Dead, which is closely associated with B-movies and thus serves as a great example, may be cheap, but it is sure as hell not unimaginative. I'm not sure what you're take on it is, but it is without question one of the most influential genre films ever made.

Don't be so broad in your detractions.

Not at all, I'd just like you know, a decent reason to care about the bugs at all, not just a video game premise.

Which remains totally unexplained. You've got creatures with no technology randomly lobbing rocks at planets of which they have no knowledge. You can call it intentionally silly, but it's not a comedy, it's an excuse for 2 hours of boring, pointless action sequences.

And, they have the benefit of being cheap to simulate, having wasted the entire effects budget on the totally unconvincing creatures...

Action and effects are fine, if you give me some that don't suck. If I'm paying to see a movie whose entire appeal is based on effects and action sequences, at least give me some effects and action that kick ass. That's what makes the first two Terminator films classics of the genre. And the lack of decent effects and action sequences in a movie that already lacks any other reason to be moves Starship Troopers from the 'mediocre but fun' category to the 'Holy **** this is ****in' terrible!' category.

Child, let me illustrate the difference between 'confidence' and 'hostility' for you, since the English language is apparently not your strong suit.

Stating your opinion without caveats and modifiers = 'confidence.'

Suggesting someone has a 'learning disorder' because they don't like the same movies = 'hostility.'

See the difference?

No, a 0 out of 10 reflects the utter disgust I feel when I see this movie.

In this case, it means they blew a $100 million on bad CG effects and marketing, and then shat out two hours of horribly acted, directed and edited trash and hoped to recoup their costs on the backs of bored kids on summer break.

Have you seen the director's commentary? The chump clearly believes he's made some masterpiece of subversive cinema. Of course, he thought Showgirls had a message, too.

All three of the Evil Dead films are excellent, but they're classic examples of exceptions that prove the rule (as are Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead).

But the truth is, Starship Troopers tries to glom onto the charming camp associated with the better B-movies, but it isn't itself a B-movie, and the whole enterprise falls flat.

It was explained that the bugs would lob their spore into space in the hope of colonizing other planets. It was one of these giant spore pods which dislodged the meteor out of its regular orbit.

Ah, the goading. A telling trait of a man desperate for an arguement. It's of no surprise, though, given how obvious of an attempt for attention it was to attack a movie in direct reference to the people who enjoy it.

You're not going to make anyone cry because you bent their Wookie, so get over it and don't take it as hostility when someone bites your flagrant bait.

No, suggesting someone has a learning disorder because they stated matter-of-factly that a movie which is as dumb as they come was incomprehensible is not hostile, it is apropriate.

At minimum you must be 13 years old to join this site, so giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you are, at least, 13, your inability to comprehend a movie which could easily be entirely understood by 9 year olds would be directly indicative of a learning disorder.

It was a perfectly fair question. Considering I did have to explain the very simplistic answer as to why the meteor was dislodged from its orbit, I may not have been that far off base. My apologies if it hit too close to home.

Do you make it a habit to sit through DVD commentaries from director's you clearly loathe for movies you hate even more? And given that you feel "utter disgust" whenever you watch the movie, sitting through multiple viewings is either pathetic or masochistic. My money is on the former.

That's in the novel, but it's not nearly so clear in the film.

Yes child, I'm 'goading' you by pointing out that personal insults are a sign of hostility. :rolleyes:

That's right, calling 'bull****' on the ludicrous claims made by the IMDB fanboys sure is an attention grab. You really can't seem to grasp the simple concept that not everyone likes the same movies.

The tenuous cause and effect relationships in the plot are a major reason the movie IS so dumb, or is that another concept that eludes you?

*Yawn* When action occurs for reasons that are inadequately explained by backstory, you get comprehensibility problems. They're called 'plot holes.' When these 'plot holes' are small, they're easy to overlook. When they detract from the cohesion of the narrative, they're a problem.

This is only tenuously alluded to in the film, which seems more concerned with the contact between the bugs and Mormon colonists than with providing any justification for the subsequent action.

Like a lot of people, I am curious as to what motivates people to make something this dreadful. So you're telling me that you've never looked out the window at a bad wreck in the other lane? And, if you're going to give a movie a bad review, don't you think you have an obligation to view it more than once and maybe see if you're missing what the director was after?

I'm with Purandara on this one. Starship Troopers was boring eight years ago when I was thirteen and watching it. Quite frankly, the only reason I didn't leave is because I had heard there were more boobs towards the end. (Give me a break, I was 13)

To say it is bad does not sum it up entirely. It's not bad in the traditional way a movie like this is bad. It is bad in the way in which it completely attempts to prefigure a more militaristic instict and attitude in humankind. However, the movie is so poorly acted (and directed/written) that the main character does not seem this way at all, rather he seems to be a whiny little girly man.

Really? Then I must be a genius, since I haven't read the novel. Or maybe it was the line, "hurling their spore into space", or better yet, the huge images of giant beetles hurling their spore into space.
I was talking about the word choice of "child", a clearly derogatory stab which you've once again brought out.

I don't give a damn if you like the movie or not - I thought that was pretty clear from the multiple times I mentioned it's all a matter of taste. But some of your reasoning is not a matter of taste. The film being marginally comprehensible, for one.

What else is inadequately explained? What else is incomprehensible to you? I'd be glad to answer any questions you have. Or you could take a walk in the park and ask any kid on a swingset to break it down for you.

Of course I stare out the window at a horrible car wrecks. I even slow down in the hopes of seeing a body being dragged out of a mangled mess. But I don't stare at it for 129 minutes and I don't go back later for another 129 minutes, nor do I listen to a man try to make excuses for why the car wreck happened for a further 129 minutes - especially when the entire process fills me with "utter disgust".

**** is **** whether you watch it once or for a combined six and a half hours. I trust my instincts. But I don't go spouting hyperbole to attack a film just because other people did like it.

The causus belli is vaguely alluded to (but never shown), more time is spent showing us 'hilarious' censored newsfeeds than establishing a reason for the subsequent action.

Clearly, we have incommiserable views on this film. So I don't see any reason to keep doing the Ratt thing and wasting time.