MovieChat Forums > Lion (2017) Discussion > My problem with this movie

My problem with this movie

posted 7 years ago by Clyburn
6 replies | jump to latest

I was really bothered by the self defeating stupidity of the guy's search for his home.

It reminded of the movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly where the guy who could only communicate by blinking - so his caregivers would recite the alphabet - over and over - and he would blink when they needed to stop - and he spelled things that way - one letter at a time - and I'm like START BY TEACHING THE GUY MORSE CODE YOU GINORMOUS MORONS!!

In the case of Lion, dude, bring more people into it. Get more ideas and a spirit of scientific collaboration. Chicky-poo wants to help. Let her. Or if you're down on her, let someone else help. It's an interesting enough scenario - I bet you could get 10 helpers. Maybe a thousand.

Is your priority to wallow in torment or get an answer?

My immediate and constant thought was: we have an incorrect town name Ganastulay. Maybe it is being mispronounced slightly. Maybe get a list of every single town that starts with, oh, say, the letter G - and look at them.

Say isn't there an Indian god Ganesh? That actually sounds quite a bit like the starting of Ganastulay. Sometimes gods end up in place names. Too obvious?

If you want to have someone doing the speed-of-trains and search radius thing ---> why not? Cross reference stuff. People talk to each other and have inspirations.

Seems to me the whole search should have taken about an hour and twelve minutes.

[–] stefan-79-235442 7 years ago

Agree. If he Let his friends help it would be done in a few weeks

[–] Daemon-Core 7 years ago

It's easy for you to say seeing it from the outside in 2 hrs without living through it.

No one else remembers seeing what he saw. Yea, he saw a water tower, but which one? Is it this one? No. How about this one? No. Not everyone is going to drop what they're doing in their lives (get a degree) for some dude. Even the the guy himself didn't drop everything, and did the search over a few years. So he chose to go at it alone, that was his decision, to his detriment or not. Not everyone asks for help. Obviously it drove a wedge between him and his girlfriend. He also didn't want to hurt his adoptive mother. There were so many emotions mixed in that influenced his behaviour and decisions. Also, there are basic life priorities.

Have you ever tried looking up a song you misheard the lyrics to? I have, and it might become very difficult to find until you hear it again. I think that's what it's like.

Someone has to put together a list of places that start with G and have that ready to be searched, and there's no guarantee that the list is up to date or complete. (Maybe they have done that but the search was inconclusive). Things don't just appear on the internet, PEOPLE post things up. See wikipedia? It's real people typing that up because they have that information to share.

If I remember correctly, the place he was looking for was shown to be well outside of the radius. Despite their "clever" calculations they were looking in the wrong area. Actually it proved that the sense of time in children is indeed off.

[–] jriley555 (7048) 5 years ago

this. also, how would he remember with any precision how long he'd been on the train.

telling a story is going to necessarily involve some assembly-line processing inefficiencies. :)

[–] mikeyflatley 7 years ago

I think ze real story wuz he wuz preoccupied wid pink puddy and when he had enuf then he decide 2 find his mum

Werd 2 ur mudda, bruddafckka

[–] evila_elf 7 years ago

I was wondering myself how easy it would be to find the real name of his place. Hard to search now because all the hype with the movie skews the results. But it is a place in a city, so a list of cities isn't helpful.

And for getting his friends to help...he would still have to be the eyes for every single place. Though friends would have helped him keep his sanity during the times.

[–] CoriSCapnSkip (1562) 7 years ago

Although at least one source mentioned some use of Facebook, according to this, Saroo actually did proceed with his Google Earth search alone, as depicted in the movie. http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/lion/

Perhaps he was too emotionally involved, too nervous about the outcome, or simply felt that due to the nature of his memories only he could make the search, but it seems the movie did not depict his six-year effort as a lone quest to be dramatic but to portray how it actually took place.