Those eyes! If there is anything that caught my attention as the movie started, it was that bright sparkling blue eyes of the actors. Of course, they are contacts, but were they damn good ones. Unique I should say in that I could not keep on not staring at those eyes.
Superficiality aside, I like the movie. It's about freedom, it's about family, it's about finding love. Classical themes of legends, stories and myths of long ago. Timeless yet always timely. Emotional at it is tragic. The story of man across the ages, of unfolding meaning as finding meaning. Life as in its mysteries perplexing as it is the struggle for individuality. And to be psychiatric about it, the struggle of the self against the self, of selves to other selves. It is really a story of man himself projected in a post-modern science fiction Hollywood reel trapped in a psychosis of eternal enmity between what is the will of the mind and the realities of existence itself.
Humanity assaulted by alien entities through ruthless expropriation of human bodies in its ultimate quest to rule over and above man. Seeker (Diane Kruger), the leader of the alien horde, seeks to uncover remaining pockets of human resistance as newly conquered bodies are mined for memories of their human connections. Melanie Stryder (Saoirse Ronan), the main protagonist, somehow establishes rapport with her alien occupier, a soul called "Wanderer" and convinces the latter to help save her brother by not revealing further information as to his mountain hideout. Escaping from the liar of the alien overlord Seeker, Melanie is found by a band of humans with whom her brother Jamie (Chandler Canterbury) and her boyfriend Jared Howe (Max Irons) are holed up with.
Almost to be killed, Melanie was somehow saved by the leader of the group, also her uncle named Jeb (William Hurt), who ordered his fellow humans not to terminate Melanie. On a walk across the fields, Jeb asks Wanderer if human will and memories are still intact once infused with the alien souls. Wanderer, now endears herself to the human survivors and is now called "Wanda." Wanda develops affinity for the human survivors and questions her species' intentions. Wanda too falls in love with a human, Ian O'Shea (Jake Abel).
Behind the backdrop of the stunning buttes of the American West is actually a love story, a love quadrangle I should say between two entities trapped in one body and Jared and Ian. It is a Titanic love story set in the arid landscape of a futuristic milieu.
It is also a story of letting go, of moving on, of love unrequited, of pain that goes with letting go. But that is life, that is the story in which life is painted, its colors true and real. I guess the story of the story is that indeed, some good things never last. And to let go is courage itself, fearlessness and fortitude. And that whatever we are, whatever we have, nothing is tragic when life is lived to love, with love in openness to those that touch our lives and for whom and with whom by each others presence and look, we find that unique connectedness that only we ourselves will ever know.
It is pretty terrible. The premise itself sounds decent enough, but the way it's executed is just bad. Nice review.
TumugonBurahin