+8
The Last Supper
I had forgotten all about this film since I watched it, but it quickly came back to me.
In some ways it looks dated, but in other ways it seems more pertinent than ever. The internet seems to be increasingly full of rage and it isn’t hard to imagine “social justice warriors” actually taking up arms. I have seen people bully and threaten others over using a word they find offensive with apparently no sense that they were doing the same thing but worse. People genuinely advocating burning books and movies because they disagree with something the author or director has said. I’ve often thought if some people could kill people with whom they disagreed by pressing a button on their keyboard, they’d probably believe they were doing humanity a favour. (It’s probably been covered in Black Mirror (or soon will be).)
Anyway, in this film the students first face the whole ‘let’s kill Hitler’ dilemma (but without the time travel, which let’s be honest, would have made it a bit more interesting). But then they start off on a downward slope where it becomes all too easy to kill people who disagree with them even slightly. Or, as a review I read on imdb put it, “...*[they] become drunk with their own sense of self-righteousness. Their hunt to destroy future Hitlers blinds them to the reality that they are the future Hitlers. For what was Hitler, but a man who thought he could build a better society by eliminating the undesirables?*”
And in the end of course, liberal in-fighting and aggression doesn’t just enable the rise of the right, it paves the way. Prophetic? Perhaps.
As a premise, it’s fascinating, even essential. As a film, not so much. It’s nowhere near as sharp or as funny as it could be. The characters are, by necessity, caricatures. It’s ultimately unsatisfying. And, as evidenced by the fact that I had all but forgotten about it in the intervening twenty years, it’s not particularly memorable. But it is worth watching.
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