A superb movie with the typical (small) Mendes flaw -- At the end Michael -- age 12 in 1932 -- says he never touched a gun again even though he would have been 22 in 1942. So he became a draft-dodger or a CO, which doesn't fit with the rest of his personality. A similar flaw bedeviled the wonderful American Beauty -- Chris Cooper's retired Marine was written as a pastiche of slanderous cliches about Vietnam vets and servicemen in general!
shareITS A MOVIE!!!
shareSkyfall :
Scene A. Sex slave introduced without dialogue.
Scene B. Sex slave bullied into giving information.
Scene C. Sex slave gets ƒucked.
Scene D. Watches sex slave's head get blown off then makes a quip.
Every scene thereafter - Sex slave never mentioned again.
Curse yoooou, liberal lefty PC, Mendes!
"Let's all get along like the military dictatorship taught us."
Back in 2001 guns weren't really an issue back then, were they? I know of Colorado's shooting that happened in 1999. I'm not American, so not familiar political issues back then.
shareBill Clinton's assault rifle ban spanned from 1994 - 2004, although it didn't really ban anything (only the production of new rifles with certain characteristics). It was also around this time that the infamous Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents occured, which involved firearm related issues.
shareThat was not Bill Clinton's Assault Weapons Ban, that was Diane Feinstein:
In November 1993, the proposed legislation passed the U.S. Senate. The bill's author, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and other advocates said that it was a weakened version of the original proposal.[8] In May 1994, former presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan, wrote to the U.S. House of Representatives in support of banning "semi-automatic assault guns." They cited a 1993 CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll that found 77 percent of Americans supported a ban on the manufacture, sale, and possession of such weapons.[9]
Obviously he didn't author the bill but he did sign it into law. The point still stands regarding reichen4eva's question regarding gun issues in politics circa 2001.
shareGuns have been a hot topic issue in America since at least the 70s.
shareActor Lew Ayers was a CO, served as a medic, refused to carry a weapon
There were many COs in WW2 that served honorably
What bothers me most is that the kid was about to let himself be killed because he couldn't bring himself to shoot someone clearly, and unmistakably intent on murdering him. That's not moral. Squeamishness is not moral. Being paralyzed by fear -- cowardice, in a word -- is not Moral. To quote the late Robert A. Heinlein, "Morals — all correct moral laws — derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level." Behavior which promotes survival, of one's self, then one's family, then one's community, then one's nation, is moral behavior, in ascending order. Allowing yourself to be killed by an evil man bent on murder isn't moral; it just gets you a Darwin award.
I am no admirer of pacifism. I think another golden age scifi author, Poul Anderson, put it well, at the end of the book Ensign Flandry, when he wrote "...ever since Aknaton ruled in Egypt, and probably before then, a school of thought has held that we ought to lay down our weapons and rely on love. That, if love doesn't work, at least we'll die guiltless. Usually even its opponents have said this is a noble idea. I say it stinks. I say it's not just unrealistic, not just infantile, it's evil. It denies we have any duty to act in this life."
This is just another way of saying something that is usually misattributed to the great statesman Edmund Burke: the saying that "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." Pacifism is the philosophy of doing nothing, even in the face of evil. I can't agree that's a noble thing.
Excellent post, Darren.
shareMendes, and really writer Alan Ball's, turning a veteran in "American Beauty" into a psycho was standard-order anti-military pablum. But, I don't see an issue with the end of "Road to Perdition." Michael saw a TON of violence and saw his father get brutally murdered, so it makes sense that he had seen enough.
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