Of all the different movies out there, I like to watch the ones that make me think; about money, and friends, work, love and even life itself. At the end of these movies I always ask myself, “What would I do, if this were my life?”.
One of the movies that made me think the most about my beliefs towards life and death was a movie called “Tuck Everlasting”. The movie was about a young girl who came across the Tucks, a family living in the woods owned by her family. As it turns out, the Tucks had mistakenly drunk from a fountain of youth, granting them immortality. They had already been alive over 100 years. The young girl fell in love with the youngest of the Tuck boys and was given the chance to choose immortality. But as Mr. Tuck told her “What we Tucks have, you can't call it living. We just... are. We're like rocks, stuck at the side of a stream”. While the young girl pondered the chance for immortality and a life with the young Tuck, Mr. Tuck said to her, “Don't be afraid of death, Winnie. Be afraid of the unlived life”.
If you had the choice between living a full life and dying eventually or living eternally, what would you choose?
“Equilibrium” mad me think about the quality of life. Set sometime in the future, the government has eliminated war by suppressing emotions. Books, art and music are forbidden and feeling is a crime punishable by death. There is no love in a society like this, no friendship and no affection. There is no appreciation and no respect for others, no freedom of choice and very minimal individuality. Indeed it’s true that love is messy, and feelings can get out of hand, but for all their flaws, is life really better without emotions?
If you could choose to eliminate emotions, to think only logically, would you be willing to forgo all your feelings in order not to feel pain?
“The Matrix” takes another angle altogether. Thomas A. Anderson discovers that human life on Earth is nothing more than an elaborate fa?ade created by cyber-intelligence. The world we live in is an imaginary program made to give humans the illusion that everything is alright in the world while they are used as fuel for The Matrix. So while we walk around doing our everyday things and contemplating the meaning of life, does the world we live in really exist?
Assuming life does indeed exist, is it set in stone and unchangeable? “The Butterfly Effect” tells the story of Evan Treborn. Evan has the power to go backwards in time and change the past in order to prevent pain and suffering in the present. As he quickly discovers, it’s not as simple as changing one persons life. Every time he changes one thing for the better, something worse happens to someone else. Only when he finds a scenario where he doesn’t interfere, can he find the best solution.
If you had the power to change your past to make your present better, at the chance that you would hurt someone else, would you do it?
While all these movies are generally fictional, they ask the hard questions. Do we really exist? Can we change the past? Does love last forever? Is beauty everything? Does everything we do only affect us? Do we appreciate what we have?
If this was your life, what would you do?
Tsoof and Eden love to download full movies from the Internet.
