Fatalism and Love

The movie explores deeply not only the ethics of capital punishment, but also the question of free-will and selfhood. Mainly are we fully in control of ourselves when we commit certain acts of random violence ? Do we remain the same overtime, and if not, is punishing a reformed person for what its unreformed predecessor did constitutes an act of justice or scapegoating ?

In addition it addresses the right of military officers to put their humanistic principles and ethics above the orders of their superiors, who may be ethically inferior than they.

At a different plot level the movie depicts certain rare type of love between two people when the two are so intimately connected to each other that they understand each other without any words.

And at last the movie advances fatalism as something unavoidable. Whatever we do or don't do, we cannot escape our ultimate fate - ultimate, irreversible and meaningless annihilation . Our only comfort in this life is to genuinely love each other, as we seen between the captain and his wife, and the condemned prisoner and his wife. A day of such love can be more fulfilling than a century of gray, emotionless existence (such as that of the governor) on an island rock.