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Jacob's Ladder
Psychological Thriller / English / 1990
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Considered a pre-millennium classic by some, Jacob's Ladder is one of the most popular recommendations when it comes to psychological thriller genre, and I've seen it cited as inspiration for other well known properties like Silent Hill.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I expected there to be a big reveal by the end of this movie, but I didn't expect it to be that "Jacob's Ladder" refers to a drug. While clearly it also carries a double meaning for whether Jacob is going to heaven or hell, it's a bit bizarre.
Basically, Jacob is a Vietnam vet who experiences inordinate flashbacks to a battle in Vietnam is struggles to remember, but also experiences increasingly horrific visions in his day-to-day life, suggestive that he made have some sort of mental illness.
Frustratingly, the trailer for this movie explicitly spoils the surprise and the movie itself doesn't take too long before also asserting that Jacob is indeed dead. Supposedly he died after having taken a rage-inducing drug which caused his platoon to kill each other... but also he's invented an entire narrative where he came back home, was resuscitated by a chiropractor, got divorced from his wife (before or after the military? I don't know), and hooked up with an entirely new love interest.
At the 45 minute mark we completely shift gears to his pre-divorce life, before one of his sons is hit and killed by a car, but then we shift back to the present(?) and I'm a bit lost at this point.
Again, I don't really understand the full sequence of events, whether this is a life he lead prior to the military, or whether he entirely manufactured this new relationship. Thankfully it doesn't convolute the plot much farther than that and the movie manages to stay mostly coherent despite it's anachronistic structure and casual bleeding of flashbacks and hallucinations.
Eventually it is confirmed that Jacob is indeed dead when he returns home and only finds the son who died to greet him and bring him upstairs into the light, it couldn't be much more blatant. The only thing the closing scene adds is the background tune which sources a song that Jacob sings on a couple occasions throughout the movie, perhaps representing the earliest evidence that he's actually dead.
There are some cool ideas in this movie and it's presentation I can definitely see inspiring other works, but on it's own I feel like there are things it did that it didn't need to do.
I really don't know why the chiropractor needed to exist as a character, unless the intention was for him to be a literal angel to Jacob. I suppose his role makes sense if we're providing that, but even so his scenes are given such an uneven weight and they contribute nothing significant to the movie overall.
I was seriously speculating that it was going to be revealed that Jacob's chiropractor accidentally killed him with a spinal adjustment, which totally could have happened.
I also don't really like the emphasis on Jacob having two separate love interests at different times. I suppose it imposes a layer of grief for Jacob to flashback to a life he wishes he still had but can't have anymore, but then we're contrasting that with this new woman who he ostensibly gets along with and... again I don't even know if she's a figment of his dying imagination or what.
It sure seems strange for "Purgatorio" to take the shape of imagining you're a mailman living out of a budget apartment in the New York slums... and all of this is downstream of some government coverup of chemical warfare experiments in Vietnam?? It's all kinda weird.
It seems like the only takeaway from this movie is that, the dead need to let go of their past to move on... but of all the ways to communicate that, this borderline horror movie really wants to make a yarn of it.
I don't how to feel about it. It's not a bad movie, but it makes me want to revisit Death Parade.
Final Verdict: [Okay]
Jacob's Ladder
Psychological Thriller / English / 1990
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Considered a pre-millennium classic by some, Jacob's Ladder is one of the most popular recommendations when it comes to psychological thriller genre, and I've seen it cited as inspiration for other well known properties like Silent Hill.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I expected there to be a big reveal by the end of this movie, but I didn't expect it to be that "Jacob's Ladder" refers to a drug. While clearly it also carries a double meaning for whether Jacob is going to heaven or hell, it's a bit bizarre.
Basically, Jacob is a Vietnam vet who experiences inordinate flashbacks to a battle in Vietnam is struggles to remember, but also experiences increasingly horrific visions in his day-to-day life, suggestive that he made have some sort of mental illness.
Frustratingly, the trailer for this movie explicitly spoils the surprise and the movie itself doesn't take too long before also asserting that Jacob is indeed dead. Supposedly he died after having taken a rage-inducing drug which caused his platoon to kill each other... but also he's invented an entire narrative where he came back home, was resuscitated by a chiropractor, got divorced from his wife (before or after the military? I don't know), and hooked up with an entirely new love interest.
At the 45 minute mark we completely shift gears to his pre-divorce life, before one of his sons is hit and killed by a car, but then we shift back to the present(?) and I'm a bit lost at this point.
Again, I don't really understand the full sequence of events, whether this is a life he lead prior to the military, or whether he entirely manufactured this new relationship. Thankfully it doesn't convolute the plot much farther than that and the movie manages to stay mostly coherent despite it's anachronistic structure and casual bleeding of flashbacks and hallucinations.
Eventually it is confirmed that Jacob is indeed dead when he returns home and only finds the son who died to greet him and bring him upstairs into the light, it couldn't be much more blatant. The only thing the closing scene adds is the background tune which sources a song that Jacob sings on a couple occasions throughout the movie, perhaps representing the earliest evidence that he's actually dead.
There are some cool ideas in this movie and it's presentation I can definitely see inspiring other works, but on it's own I feel like there are things it did that it didn't need to do.
I really don't know why the chiropractor needed to exist as a character, unless the intention was for him to be a literal angel to Jacob. I suppose his role makes sense if we're providing that, but even so his scenes are given such an uneven weight and they contribute nothing significant to the movie overall.
I was seriously speculating that it was going to be revealed that Jacob's chiropractor accidentally killed him with a spinal adjustment, which totally could have happened.
I also don't really like the emphasis on Jacob having two separate love interests at different times. I suppose it imposes a layer of grief for Jacob to flashback to a life he wishes he still had but can't have anymore, but then we're contrasting that with this new woman who he ostensibly gets along with and... again I don't even know if she's a figment of his dying imagination or what.
It sure seems strange for "Purgatorio" to take the shape of imagining you're a mailman living out of a budget apartment in the New York slums... and all of this is downstream of some government coverup of chemical warfare experiments in Vietnam?? It's all kinda weird.
It seems like the only takeaway from this movie is that, the dead need to let go of their past to move on... but of all the ways to communicate that, this borderline horror movie really wants to make a yarn of it.
I don't how to feel about it. It's not a bad movie, but it makes me want to revisit Death Parade.
Final Verdict: [Okay]