He doesn’t have the control to protect himself or Karen or bring his dad back from the dead. For all the control the video game gives Patrick, he’s a kid who has no control. Strip away the tawdry B-movie and you have a story about a son so desperate to connect to a father he never knew that he had to invent him in a game and then try to use him as a moral compass. But when you put it all out there, the twist doesnt really elevate the films quality, just its lunacy. Writer-director Steven Knight picked the right medium for Patrick because it tells us about Patrick’s means of expression.Īnd that means of expression is surprisingly sad. Serenity is a movie thats truly about the journey, not the destination. Serenity isn’t meant to be a treatise on video games as much as it’s using the medium of video games to express a thematic point similar to how Inception isn’t about dream logic as much as using dreams to tell a story with clearly defined rules. To see Baker wrestle with the moral choice-do you kill an evil man if it means protecting someone you love-is a reflection of Patrick’s choice. In a novel, there’s only one choice and only one path. The player has choice, but the avatar must follow the player’s decision. Video games present the fascinating paradox of choice and compulsion. But a novel wouldn’t quite fit in a story about choice. And yet that leap ends up giving far more weight to the overall story.Īnd yet I’m inclined to believe that if the twist had been Patrick’s writing a novel, audiences would be more willing to accept the twist. New film Serenity has one of the most ludicrous twists in film history. It’s a major leap to bridge the story of a fisherman who compulsively needs to fish to a story about that man’s son who wants to murder his abusive stepdad. The question we have to look at with Serenity’s twist is “Does it work?” and I believe that, for the most part, it does. Any reviewer of Serenity is likely to struggle not to spoil its humongous plot twist. Dill is based on John Mason, Patrick's actual father who died in Iraq in 2006. That being said, it’s not enough to simply shock the audience. In the final moments of the movie, it becomes clear that Dill is trapped in a video game that has been programmed by his real-life son, Patrick (Rafael Sayegh). Serenity does just that when it reveals what looked liked a sultry thriller of murder, sex, and deceit turned out to be a traumatized teenager’s video game. In an age where movies are pre-sold within an inch of their lives, studios live or die on formulaic storytelling, and trailers give away the majority of the plot, it’s genuinely thrilling that a film can come out and surprise its audience. "No one dies in the game," Reid tells Baker.As I said in my review, Serenity is not the film you’re expecting. Naturally, Baker undergoes a crisis of identity and free will, but decides to obey his son anyway and go through with killing the abusive husband, despite the game's various NPCs trying to thwart him - including at one point his first mate Duke ( Djimon Hounsou) hiring a group of gangsters to break the husband's hands so he can't fish. But Baker retains all those memories of his son and his time in the war, and for some reason, can hear his son as Patrick inputs the code that changes a mundane fishing game into a murder scenario. Baker is based on his father, who had died in the Iraq War. Is he an alien? A prophet? No, Reid is literally the "rules" of a video game.īaker Dill is not a real person, but a character in a fishing video game that his son has been tampering with to play out his fantasies of killing a digital version of his abusive step-father. He continues to babble, revealing that he knows all about Baker's obsession with the tuna called "Justice" and his intention to kill the man abusing his ex-wife. But he lets something slip as Baker tries to push him out of his house: "I am the rules," Reid says. Reid introduces himself as a representative of a fishing company that wants to give Baker a fish tracker free of charge. But that premise is completely disrupted when Reid Miller finally catches up with Baker. Serenity appears to be planting the seeds for a supernatural twist.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |