Did anyone else not particularly like this one? I've rented the series on the strength of Decalogue IV which I thought was superb but this one, after a very promising first 15/20 minutes, just didn't strike a chord with me for whatever reason. Anyone else feel the same?
shareI have the opposite feeling. The last 15/20 minutes were superb to me. When the father realizes something is wrong with his child, the night scene at the lake with all the town gathered in front of the ice, the moment when all the people kneel and the man is just devastated as he beholds the frozen remains of his son...and the ending at that church...oh the ending was beautiful in my opinion. Visually I like cold locations so that improved my cinematic experience with Decalogue One. All in all I loved this episode, maybe with future re-watchs you may end loving it too!
shareSo what exactly are they trying to tell me with this episode? That science is bad?
Had high expectations, but was very disappointed in the first episode. I expected a more critical or "mature" take at the ten commandments and not religious propaganda like this.
I think the film was trying to say that science is not necessarily bad but that there are more important things, such as love, and more powerful things, such as fate. Or is this view also uncritical, immature religious propaganda?
share[deleted]
I agree. I'm lucky that I didn't watch the episodes in order, because if I had started out with Decalogue I, I probably wouldn't have gone on to watch the rest.
To me, it seemed the father spent a frustratingly long time evading the truth, that his son had been involved in an ice accident. He spent so much time just walking around the apartment block! It didn't occur to him that everyone was indirectly telling him where his son actually was.
I think the Commandment tackled in this episode was a particularly hard one ("thou shalt not have other gods before me") if the writers didn't want to moralize about what the characters should do. I didn't really feel empathy for the father for relying so highly on logic and science. Maybe my copy was visually dull, but the ending confirming the son's death didn't strike me either.
I think they were trying to show us that the father had little to no faith in God, however, he had such complete faith in the computer, that even when they told him the ice broke at the lake, he refused to believe that the computer could be wrong.
Most episodes (every?) are very interested in duality. So the father had as much faith in computers (or science) as a religious man would with god. You can't escape death either way.
share[EDIT] everything in this post is discussed by others, more thoroughly, in other threads...
"he refused to believe that the computer could be wrong."
I just watched this for the first time. My opinion is that he didn't "believe" the computer, because he did in fact go to the lake and jumped around and whacked the ice with a pole. I have to assume, based on his high intellect and familiarity with the environment (he didn't just move there from Spain, for example) that those actions would be seen as completely reasonable by other men that were as "smart" as he was, and those same men would have reached the same conclusion that he reached, that it was safe to skate on the ice.
I think I would have preferred that the story had some intervening event between the time the dad told the son it was safe to skate, and the accident, that would have presented a question of "what are the odds of THAT happening?" Maybe a heavy fire engine or something skidded off the road and ended up on the ice and weakened it.