A pompous, contrived, schematic high school special

"why is this freakin kid so damn violent? I didn't really buy his mother's death as a cause..."

You couldn't be more wrong. I knew someone growing up that lost their mother to cancer when he was about that age, a good kid, and this is pretty close to how he dealt with it.

why is this freakin kid so damn violent? I didn't really buy his mother's death as a cause... I mean, people don't turn into terrorists because their parents died. So on that point I do agree that the film seemed a bit manipulative and schematic. For example, the part where the other Elias suddenly decides to join Christian in the bomb plan. how did he come up with that conclusion?

It would be overly simplistic to say he became violent strictly because of his mother's death. But that is what started it. He's dealing with his mother's death, can't relate to his father, is picked on at a new school, and when he beats up the bully he gets a lot of satisfaction from that, and the knowledge that "nobody will dare touch me now." He starts to see revenge as a valid way to deal with people who transgress against you.

And Elias: he called his father to tell him that Christian was planning to make a bomb and blow up a van. But the connection was bad, and the father had had a bad day and told him, let's talk tomorrow. Sometimes that's what happens: you want to be talked out of (or into) something, but if you don't get to talk it over at a critical time, you say the hell with it and go with your own decision. Plus, missing his father, he chose the course of action that would bond him with Christian.


You must be the change you seek in the world. -- Gandhi

"why is this freakin kid so damn violent? I didn't really buy his mother's death as a cause... I mean, people don't turn into terrorists because their parents died."

To flesh out the response others have already given you here, first of all, does a pipe bomb make someone a terrorist? Not in my vocabulary. A terrorist seeks to make virtually everyone in a targeted group FEEL targeted and terrorized.

Yes, he was grieving his mother's loss, and – beyond loss of a parent – cancer death is traumatic, so much of what we witness in him can be seen to be a kind of PTSD. But it was much more his reaction to his father's response to his mother that has troubled him into a will to violence and revenge. He was convinced his father was a liar - about his mother's survival chances - and he was bitter due to being also convinced his father had given up on his mother and had legitimated her death. This made his father a symbol of (cold) rationality and of playing god in his eyes to whom he had to rebel and it meant rebelling against rules and authority in general.

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There have been so many words written about Elias and his skype talk to Anton. I can see no problem in events that happen later. The OP says that this happened to be "convenient" for authors to use it to develop the movie in the direction that they wanted from the beginning.

Hey, this is a fiction and art, so it is normal that somebody wants to tell a message, not just an entertaining story, this is (still, thank God) not Hollywood! And authors didn't have to make this bad skype connection, they didn't have to include this talk into the movie at all, they were free to do whatever they want. So, Elias could have decided to join Christian with or without this unsuccessful trying to discuss it with his father. But it is a good thing that they did it this way, showing Elias as a kid with conscience, a lost one, lost in family situation, in school, in life, seeking a kind of help. From the beginning of the movie we can see that he doesn't have a good relation with his mother who is probably too often away from home because of her career - yes, his father is also too rarely with him, but he can be apologized by a boy this age (father is in Africa, and this sounds adventurous, mystic, dramatic...) - sp he can only ask for an advice by Anton.

And there are by far smaller coincidences that can turn one's life upside-down than an unsuccessful talk. When a train is late, there are hundreds of people affected by this fact. It is a strong possibility that these maybe just few minutes delay of coming to the destination causes by at least one among these hundreds some important differences in life. They may be late on a date or an appointment, losing love or job, may be late on the plane (that might even be life-saving if the plane crashes...) and all these real situations would bother OP because they don't happen every minute to every person on Earth?

As for Anton, Polexia: he wasn't upset because of the death of his patient, because this is unfortunately something that also happens in real life, and every doctor must cope with it, especially working in a place like refugee campus - it is always a trauma, but Anton is old and experienced enough that it wouldn't distract him from talk to his far away son (after all, the patient was not a young girl but a woman, pregnant till recently when Big Man took the baby from her womb). No, Anton was upset because of what he has done. As a doctor he made a vow to help people, recently he has promised Big Man to treat and save him, but he broke the vow and promise, what would be upsetting for many people, but even more, he directly enabled lynch of his patient confronting all his attitudes, all his moral standards, all he was interceding for. This is the moment that a man can't face himself in a mirror, and has to reexamine his own beliefs and faith, opinions and attitudes, all his life postulates.

And this is a moment when he can't see a hidden prayer for a moment of his time, for an advice, a guiding hand. By not getting it, Elias makes his own choice, because (as somebody else wrote here) beside his father Christian was the only person that Elias could rely on.