The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies and an Underwhelming Farewell to Middle Earth

by Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 27, 2014

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies is a mess of a film no matter how much you wish it wasn’t.  It’s a disappointing end to a long, oh so very long journey to J.R.R Tolkien’s middle earth through the camera lens of Peter Jackson.  Five Armies follows Bilbo Baggins, still possession of the Ring, and his dwarf companions to a massive battle at the end between dwarfs, elves, man and all matter of monsters and Orcs.

The plot of the movie becomes lost in the CGI overload and the choppy editing.  By the time the movie is over, you don’t even know where you are and how you got there.  The final battle is characterless; it’s a confusing series of shots that are usually synonymous with the ending of one of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies.  There is so much going on that you can’t keep up with it.  Suddenly a character you forgot about twenty minutes ago reappears and you are expected to suddenly care about what’s happening to them.

The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are a series of epic fantasy films based of the writings of J.R.R Tolkien.  Both sets of stories take place in Middle Earth, a land with Elves, Dwarfs and Hobbits as well as Orcs, a Gollum and the evil Ringwraiths also known as the Nazgûl, battle each over the forces of good and evil.  This world is filled with details like elaborate languages and multi-generation anthropological customs.  At their heart the stories are about good versus evil, overcoming the odds and looking in the face of courage while having the sudden strength to stare back at it.  The Lord of the Rings just did it much better.

That’s the real problem between The Hobbit Trilogy and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy; we cared about Frodo, Sam and Aragorn at the end of The Return of the King, we knew what they were doing, we knew what the stakes were.  With The Hobbit, we were smothered to death, to such a point that we became desensitized to bother caring.

The fight scenes were boring this time around.  The Orcs didn’t look nearly as terrifying, and the massive use of CGI in these epic scenes dulled the pallet, it made the battles weightless.  The Uruk-Hai from The Two Towers were scary creatures that possessed weight in their world, where the big bad in The Hobbit, Azog The Defiler was a CGI mess that looked cartoonish.

Because of the poorly realized action sequences and accidental comedy there is no tension, and with no tension and poorly developed characters, you simply no longer care about who lives and who dies.  The interchangeable dwarfs are forgettable, Legolas is boring and dull, and the mild connections between the characters drift away by the time you reach for another hand full of popcorn.  The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies is a sad ending to otherwise massive filmmaking achievement on Peter Jackson’s part.  It’s just sad that these films have to go out like this, with everybody in the film so fatigued and discombobulated by the end; they all look like they just want their last paychecks so they can leave New Zealand, go home and sleep for 10 days.

The Interview: North Korea, the Media and our Obsession with Relevancy

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 25, 2014

There are some spoilers ahead so watch the 
movie first before reading any further.

The Interview is a comedy about an idiot who hosts a tabloid TV show called Skylark Tonight.  On the show he interviews celebrities about whose getting new boobs, a bald Rob Lowe and who’s having sex with whom.  It’s also about his best friend and producer buddy who wants to start doing more serious journalism.

The movie starts with a sweet little North Korean girl on a stage singing a song in front of thousands of people.  Her song asks for the agonizing death of all Americans as a missile is launched from the huge Monument of the Party Foundation structure behind her.  North Korea in the movie is on the brink of war and people around the world, namely the United States government, are starting to take notice of the madness and unpredictability of dictator, Kim Jong-un.

The self-obsessed interviewer, Dave Skylark and his more serious producer, Aaron Rapaport receive news that the supreme leader Kim Jong-un is not only a fan of the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory but also their show Skylark Tonight.  Aaron goes to China to meet with a Kim Jong-un’s beautiful advisor named Sook to discuss the terms of the interview.  Aaron and Dave decide to do the interview, which will be conducted in North Korea and where all questions for the supreme leader will be provided by his government, meaning their interview should amount to Kim Jong-un essentially interviewing himself.

Aaron has reservations about going but Dave talks him into it, and then they party hard on ‘E’ with half-naked women.  The CIA shows up the next day and asks the two hung-over men to assassinate the eternal leader, Kim Jong-un for the United States government.  After agreeing to ‘take out’ the dictator, Aaron and Dave go to Langley and train at CIA headquarters.  They learn about how they are going to kill the leader and also get some nifty gadgets for communication, scanning and tracking for when they go on their secret spy mission.

They fly to Pyongyang; the capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea where they are met by Sook, who welcomes them to her country, on behalf of Kim Jong-un.  While there Dave meets the supreme leader and finds out he’s like one of the guys.  He owns fast cars and a tank, which he and Dave fire at a group of trees.  Over one-on-one basketball, Dave and Kim sort of bond, finding many things about each other that are relatable, mainly the pressure of living up to their father’s wishes.

“You know what’s more destructive than a nuclear bomb?  Words…..” 

- Kim Jong-un to Dave while playing basketball.

Resulting from this new found bond, Dave no longer wants to assassinate Kim Jong-un.  He thinks he’s a good guy that has been merely misunderstood.  Aaron on the other hand wants to kill him and thinks that he’s just manipulating Dave.  Dave soon realizes that Kim Jong-un’s hospitality was a lie.  So he and Aaron devise a plan to expose to the world and to the North Korean people that Kim Jong-un is not a God, but rather a mortal man that forces his rule over them all.

Aside from the sexism jokes, the racism jokes, the asshole jokes and the intellectually-challenged jokes, the movie is more about the absurdity of the America media than North Korea.  Sure the movie doesn’t really have nice things to say about Kim Jong-un, his methods and his God-like lies he disseminates about himself, but the focus here is how stupid people have become in America and their unflinching desire for the lowest common denominator in their news.

The movie is also about the fear of difference.  Is Kim Jong-un someone the world should worry about?  Probably.  The movie depicts Kim Jong-un as a pretty cool dude but overwhelmed with the responsibility of ruling his country under the same hammer his father ruled by.  Soon his true colors become apparent as we see a man that is in total control of his government.  He is responsible for depraving many of his population of food while imprisoning anyone who questions his methods in concentration camps.  

The point here is North Korea is a country with a paranoid government that has cut themselves off from the rest of the world.  The country’s leader is a young man that is following in the footsteps of his totalitarian father, minus the sense of humor.  He’s a leader that drastically lies to his populace in order to gain worship and obedience from them.  Most countries do this but usually in a less fascistic way, here in the west we use the media to lie for us.  Here we gain worship and obedience through misdirection.  Here we are told to celebrate simple people with simple views, non-threatening views so we the people don’t get any bright ideas of who and how our leaders are running the country. 

The Interview is a silly movie and it’s hard sometimes to even watch James Franco, but above all the humor and in some cases humorless humor, you begin to see that this movie is about a society obsessed with fame.  It’s about a society filled with eager people willing to sell their integrity for some form of spotlight.  For that, the movie is a bit of a tragedy because in the end our heroes got the fame they were looking for.  They got the recognition but most importantly in our self-obsessed society, they got to remain relevant. 

Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin and Learning to Dance in a Machine World

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 17, 2014

“I remain just one thing, and one thing only – and that is a clown.  It places me on a far higher plane that any politician.” 

- Charlie Chaplin

Modern Times is the story of a man navigating his life through the gears of the detached machine that is the American Industrial Corporation.  It is the story of this man’s relentless iconoclasticism while in the face of mechanized conformity of the most extreme sense of the word.  The film is also a love story, forged out of this modern mess of a society.  A factory worker, who is never referred to by name because in this world names are meaningless, is forced to keep up with the unrealistic production schedule of the corporation he works for.

Modern Times explores the obscurity of the very system that claims to be the best system for all to prosper in.  This is the tragedy that economic philosopher Karl Marx continuously warned the world about.  He worried that the Superstucture would consume the wills of men and transform them essentially into zombie workers, men that shed all ambition and devote themselves to the corporation.  Marx believed that the growth of a person into a knowing and understanding member of the species would fail if the corporate industrial complex succeeded.  Marx’s dreams of human freedom and equality sadly became broken down, rebuilt and repackaged into a form of control that greedy mindless men held over the livelihood of their thousands of nameless, faceless employee.

The film explores the monotonous daily lives of the less fortunate, but it also reveals that the fortunate may be financially and societally better off, they are not happier as a result.  The film shows that this system of mass production doesn’t work for pretty well all involved.  People are not machines that should be financially forced to work among machines for the so-called betterment of humanity.

Adding insult to injury, there is a moment in the beginning of the film where the factory worker, our hero, after performing his mind-numbing repetitive tasks on an assembly line, is subjected to this absurd contraption that was designed to mechanically feed the worker while he maintains his duties on the production line.  The project fails and causes the factory worker a great deal of humiliation and pain, a theme that runs throughout the film, indignities that the people of this city suffer through as they scramble to find food in the great depression of the early 1930’s.

It is rare in the history of cinema that a film that deals with such tragedy, true as it was then as it is today, can couple itself so magically with absurdist comedy.  The reason why this was made possible, and has quite frankly rarely been duplicated, was because the comic genius of Charlie Chaplin, the writer, director and star of the film.  Like his contemporary, the delightful Buster Keaton, Chaplin came from the silent era, the quiet times before the talkies of 1928 allowed the audience to hear what the characters were speaking.

Modern Times is from 1936 and is a mix of silent and talkie cinema.  Chaplin’s genius and comedic physicality was formed, like Buster Keaton, because there was no sound.  Chaplin had to perform his thoughts to his audience; he had to act out his ideas for all to see.  It’s a unique form of communication that has been sadly lost for the most part in modern cinema.  Chaplin walked with his feet pointed out at 45 degree angles and his buttocks high in the air, his arms fumbled and his eyes only blinked when absolutely necessary.  He created a skewed version of humanity in his gaze, his movements and his interactions with people in his stories who conform to the rule of society.  His character in Modern Times is ill at ease, he’s a man that fidgets and bumps into the on-goings of the machine, whether it is the people operating as police officers, jail guards or factory workers.

The film is a masterpiece of American cinema because Charlie Chaplin was able to come off as a bombastic clown in most scenes and simultaneous never lose sight of his film’s over all narrative.  He knew what story he was telling and never lost that story in the whims of comic relief.  Chaplin was able to provide enormously sidesplitting entertainment while commenting of the state of the world as he saw it.  His characters in his films often seemed oblivious but he as a man was not.  He knew the world was a mess, he knew that a group of pass-me-down elitist were running the world, holding the population for some sort of deranged ransom for their compliance.  His true genius is he knew that reality could only be passed down to the uninformed through comedy.  He knew the elite don’t tolerate overt descent but were so blinded by dollar signs that they rarely understood metaphor.  In this little window of weakness, Chaplin found his platform.

Modern Times also stars a young woman, whose sisters are taken away from her.  Here’s where the heart of the film exists, where one man simply wants to settle down with a gamin and live happily ever after.  The woman suffers in this machine age just as the factory worker when they cross paths.  After the factory worker has been subjected to a mental institution because of his lack of conformity, he goes to jail, where he oddly begins to enjoy himself.  The solace here is no one really expects much from prisoners so, even though locked up, the factory worker finds freedom.  Here we explore the even more absurd aspects of modern society.

The factory worker is set free from the jail when he helps guards recapture the jail when thugs attempt a break out.  It’s as if he stops them because he thinks that they don’t realize how good they really have it.  He sees it as if he is doing them a favor by releasing the prison guards from a cell.  Chaplin is telling his audience the freedom we think we have, we don’t, the society we think is looking out for our best interests and is there to protect us, isn’t.  Chaplin is telling us that society, like in FightClub, is insane.  He’s telling us that because we have been drinking the Koo-aid for so long we no longer see how unfree we truly are.

Modern Times is a beautifully shot film with massive set pieces and wonderful performances.  The film carries us through a series of vignettes that themselves stand alone as magnificent.  The scene where the factory worker is carried by the conveyer belt, after failing to keep up with tightening bolts on some arbitrary piece of equipment, into the guts of the machine.  Here he is squeezed in and around gears only to be reversed back out of the machine, as if spit out for having a pulse pumping through his veins, which itself physically happens when he is escorted off the property for being – weird.  There is a scene where he and his lady attempt to play house, living the domestic life, a promise of the American Dream, only for the house to fall apart in places, his chair collapsing through the floor, him leaning on a wall and falling through into a river.  Chaplin is telling that this dream we have is fake and it doesn’t hold up to reality. 

The restaurant scene toward the end demonstrates the true masterful vision that is Charlie Chaplin.  The factory worker is tasked to perform in front of an audience, he’s reluctant but his lady believes in him so he tries.  After realizing the lyrics to the song he was supposed to sing, lyrics written on his sleeves are gone, he improvises and gives a wonderfully entertaining performance as he mumbles the lyrics in unintelligible Italian while dancing around the floor in this comedic ballet, in and around the restaurant’s customers.

Chaplin conveys his contempt for the law as he manipulates the legal system for his own benefit, with the film ending with the factory worker and his lovely lady, after escaping the authorities, walking down the paved highway toward the mountains, Chaplin is encouraging us to get out and save ourselves from the trappings of an economical mechanized self-serving society, where the elite want it all.

Modern Times is a delightful film to behold.  It’s a journey into the greasy machine of modern society but it’s also about connection.  The film shows how the system is convinced that it knows your best interests better than you do.  Most importantly is the film shows that great minds will prevail, it shows that hope can be found at the end of the tunnel.  Modern Times shows us that other people can’t take your spirit if you don’t let them, the key here is and what the film is trying to convey; is be awake enough to learn how to protect yourself from a modern fast-moving, identity-stealing world. 

“I don’t believe that the public knows what it wants; this is the conclusion that I have drawn from my career.” 

- Charlie Chaplin

Exodus: Gods and Kings and How Reality Continues to Fade into Fantasy

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 17, 2014

Exodus: Gods and Kings is an epic movie depicting the fictitious tale of the biblical rise of Moses, a man that saved a large number of Hebrew people, his people, from their Egyptian slave owners, under the guidance of the God of Abraham.  The movie is filled with massive battle scenes, sickening plagues and long walks through deserts.  It’s a movie about one man’s journey toward purpose, to find meaning in his life.  What does it mean to be alive and what am I to do to contribute while in this life?   Like Caesar in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Moses is forced to take sides and fight for the survival of his people.  He has to fight the very group of people that raised him and treated him like one of their own.

Ridley Scott’s epic film, sadly fails at achieving the greatness that his Roman Empire film Gladiator did.  Similarly, Gladiator tells the story of man that was a general and confidante to the Roman Emperor, a man the Emperor wished could succeed him but understood that blood succeeds blood and Maximus wasn’t blood.  Exodus takes this same route where the Pharaoh of Egypt, Seti could envision Moses as his successor upon his death, rather than his less king-like son Ramses.  Moses was exiled because Ramses, the new Pharaoh discovers he’s of Hebrew blood, a breed of people heavily believed by the Egyptians at a dirty inferior race of people.  Maximus was exiled because back-stabbing Commodus, the new Roman Emperor, jealous of Maximus' relationship with his father, had him sent away to be killed.  Both met had soldiers sent by the current king to kill their families.  Both men lingered in remote desperate locations while their respective executioners prospered as new leaders.  Both men would later return to their homeland to defeat the man that destroyed their lives by fighting them in one last epic battle, with both hero and enemy facing off.

The problem is Exodus ended up lacking the emotional investment that all films need to carry their audience through a journey.  Unlike Maximus, there was very little emotional attachment toward Moses to go alone with him on his journey, as a result the battles where flat and the payoff wasn’t satisfying.  By the time Frodo left the Shire in The Fellowship of the Ring, we cared about him.  When he was forced to confront evil in Middle Earth we worried for him.  We wanted him to gain the courage that was asked of him to get rid of the Ring once and for all.  In Exodus this feeling of wanting Moses to win in the end wasn’t really worth the almost three hours that was required of the audience to follow him to the Promised Land.  

Just after the Israelite Moses’ birth, a command by the Pharaoh of Egypt has gone out to kill all male Hebrew babies by throwing them in the Nile River.  Here, baby Moses was placed in a basket and sent down the river.  The Pharaoh’s daughter found the crying baby while taking a bath and adopted him.  Moses grew up in Egypt, but remained sympathetic toward the Hebrew slaves.  He would often stand up for them, even in some cases killing their Egyptian merciless guards to defend them.  After being exposed as a Hebrew, Moses roams the desert, searching for food and meaning for his nomadic life.  He wanders in a village for water where he meets and marries the beautiful Zipporah and works as a shepherd for his father-in-law.

During a rain storm Moses climbs a mountain forbidden for all to climb.  It is believed that mountain belongs to the God of Abraham and shall remain untouched.  Moses at this point in the story, an atheist, climbs the mountain anyway to collect wandering sheep when he happens upon a burning bush, a bush that burns but yet doesn’t burn up.  He is told by God, in the film appearing in the form of a young boy, to lead his people out of Egypt “into a good and spacious land, a land flowing of milk and honey.”  Moses provides God with a number of excuses why he should not be the one to do this but then he eventually agrees and obeys God’s wishes.

Moses returns to the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses and pleads that he “Let my people go”.  Ramses refuses and intensifies the workload of his Israelite slaves.  The Old Testament God then takes wrathful matters into his own hands and sends a series of plagues to Egypt in the form of frogs, locusts, hail, darkness, and more.  Ramses resisted plague after brutal plague even though his country was in turmoil while the land where the Israelites lived was spared.  Ramses ends up being Moby Dick’s stubborn Ahab character in some way, where he never knows when enough is enough.  He’s a man consumed by power and legacy and is free of any compassion toward humanity as a whole.

The last plague that God unleashed upon Egypt was to strike down all the firstborn in all human and livestock families.  The Israelites prepared ahead of time by washing their doorways with lambs blood so God would pass over their homes with no harm.  This allegorical event would later institute the Jewish celebration of Passover.  Ramses’ son died in his crib along with many other firstborn thus convincing the Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave his lands for good.  

Moses directs his people away from Egypt toward the Promised Land, but not too long before the Pharaoh changes his mind and follows them, desiring to leave non alive.  Moses leads his people across the Red Sea that God allowed him to part, in the case of the movie; receded, so they can be free of their Egyptian pursuers.  By the time the Israelites make it the other side, God lets the Red Sea flow again, resulting in the deaths of all the Egyptians in their chariots.  The movie had a big showdown between Moses and Ramses, swords in hand before a massive tidal wave engulfed them and separated them, leaving Moses on the side of the Israelites and Ramses on the side of thousands of dead Egyptian soldiers beached by the giant wave.
     

For many years Moses leads his people in circles in order for the old complainers, the ones that wish to return to Egypt and live out their days as slaves, to die off.  The hope here is for the new generation to start fresh.  God had the group stop at Sinai and called Moses to the top of the mountain so he could lay down his laws of the land as well as plans for construction of a tabernacle, which become a precursor to the temple.  Moses receives the Ten Commandments on tablets for the people to live by.  In the film he writes the commandments through God’s will rather than the lightening carving we might be used to from the Charlton Heston starring, Cecil B. DeMille directed film The Ten Commandments. 

Exodus is a failed project on a massive scope but not without some good scenes.  It attempted to endear us to the plight of Moses but instead, through horrible casting and plastic looking armor, never let us get caught up in its fantasy, where a film like Gladiator did.  Exodus seemed disorganized and confused about what direction and what themes it wanted to convey.  The film might have been in better hands of a religious director rather than a secular one.

The problem here is the story isn’t real but yet a great number of people in our modern society believes it is.  The film attempts to balance realism and the expectations of a massive group of people that believe this story to be true, into one cohesive narrative.  It fails by trying to please both sides of the ongoing debate of whether there is a God that is the creator of us all, or whether we evolved from apes into the species we are now and simply made up a God.

Now any mindful person knows we did make it all up.  We as a species are among billions but yet are seemingly prisoners in our own minds.  The creation of God provides a unifying force that serves as a community and security in a confusing universe.  It allows us to cheat death, an inevitable demise we all wish to avoid.  The stories of the bible were written by groups of people that wanted to invent a mythology, about their history that didn’t resemble the truth, but rather justified the actions of misguided people into believing that their motives were just.  This fictional form of storytelling allowed fathers to tell their sons about how much they are heroes.  You never hear of a tribe of people telling their young ones they are monsters that kill and prey on the weak.  No father wants his son to know that he’s afraid; he wants his son to know that he’s brave so the son will in turn mimic that bravery.  Fathers never tell their sons about how they have sliced the throats of unsuspecting men.  They tell them that they fought for some sort of freedom, some form of righteousness.  Basically we lie, we lie about our demons by telling fabrications of the events to suit whatever agenda we want our followers to believe.  

  

This is the hard truth about the story of men.  We want to be seen as something we are not; we want to justify our actions by distorting reality.  The truth is; we are animals that have the conscious ability to think for ourselves but are scared to death of the world outside our field of sight.  We fear the Other, we fear difference but ultimately, we fear ourselves.  We are the enemy not them, whoever they might be.  The real enemy is the ghost in the machine that tells you things about yourself, and your abilities that is contrary to the beliefs and the rituals that you have been indoctrinated into, in your particular society.

These biblical stories provide a fictional basis for us to live our real lives by.  They are often beautifully written by ghostwriters and convey many levels of morality that one ought to live their life by.  The problem here though is so much of this book is not only lost in translation, it is old enough to ignite the imaginations of limited thinking people to believe that what is written, are the words of a God.  This all still goes back to scared people that are afraid to put the work into enlightenment.  They instead seek fast-food sensibility where being told what to think becomes their warm blanket in an often cold world, this form of cowardice is equal to that of hiding under the bed when the wind blows, or seeking refuge in a closet because a shadow along the wall moved.  Scientists are the most grown up among us.  Religious believers are the children that never grew up emotionally while reality began to creep into their world as they got older; causing the very fear that perpetuates and sustains their religious fantasy in the first place.

  

Under the Skin: Curiosity and Living in a World Consumed by Chaos

by Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 13, 2014

“The eyes are the window to your soul.”

– William Shakespeare

Spoiler Alert!: This organic film is a true cinematic experience so please view the film, if you haven't already, before reading any further.

Under the Skin, a breathtaking film adaptation of the Michel Faber novel of the same name is a wonderfully mysterious erotic film about an alien that takes on the form of a beautiful young woman and hunts her prey on the damp streets of Glasgow, Scotland.  The visually unique and stunning film follows this indifferent being as she lures her unsuspecting lonely victims into an otherworldly liquid chamber for processing.  This subcutaneous alien, simply known as Laura, as a consequence of inhabiting a foreign body, and experiencing a life through human eyes, becomes a victim herself of something we all hold dear, our humanity.  She begins to feel and in some cases, to enjoy this human body, but that fraction of joy soon manifests itself into fear which leads to vulnerability and then exposure.

The oddly disturbing but equally fascinating film opens with her creation, her upload into human form.  In the most surrealist point in the film, we see circular rings in a void forming what soon becomes a spherical eyeball.  We hear screeches and reverberating pitches that begin to focus and tune into human speech.  This would be similar to tuning a guitar or a piano as the linguistic nuances of the English language come into fruition. 

A mysterious man on a motorcycle carries the limp body of a woman, placing her in the back of a cargo van.  Laura stands naked within this brightly lit void and removes the clothing from the girl, near death, staring at her.  This girl is an exact copy of Laura; she looks up at Laura as tears uncontrollably escape her eyes, resulting from her allowing human emotion to creep into her consciousness and consume her prime directive.  She was clearly an earlier version that like Laura will soon see, went out into the world to collect bodies for processing in their liquid chamber and subsequently became too attached to the fate of her prey, thus developing empathy.  When this timorous girl stares up at Laura in retrospect after seeing the film, says a lot not only of Laura’s inevitable doom but of her expendable worth to the overall project that they are there to execute.

Laura, ignorant of this girl’s emotional state, removes her clothing as if she was already dead, putting the clothing on herself and then examines an ant crawl along her finger.  This ant, possessing an intimidating appearance in itself but yet is weak and fragile, is a warning to Laura’s overall fate.  That ant and Laura’s instant curiosity of it has set in motion a series of events that, like the poor hapless alien near death on the floor, Laura is destined to become yet again another casualty of their project on earth, or where ever else they go for that matter in the universe.

A number of space ships take off from the rooftop of a skyscraper, cloaked within the clouds.  Then as Laura sets out on her mission she first must fit in, she must assimilate herself to the environment thus creating a sort of camouflage so she can blend in.  She soon discovers in a mall mankind’s superficial view of the female body with the make-up and fashionable clothing.  She gets herself a fur coat and while sitting in her newly acquired van, she applies red lipstick to her lips, preparing herself as bait to her predictably sexually hungry male prey. 

Laura sets out on the hunt, driving along the streets of Glasgow impassively studying the people going about their day for their calorific value.  She seeks out alone men and attempts to seduce them, asking them questions about themselves.  She smiles and makes them feel liked before inviting them back to an apartment building or house, the location of the chamber changes throughout the film.  Once inside, a possible other dimension, she walks ahead of them while she removes her clothing, erotically pulling them toward her with her gaze.  The male victim, in some sort of suggestive trance, removes his own clothing as he is understandably drawn to her.  

Here the film also explores the tunnel vision men often have when their focus is on beauty and sex, and nothing else, thus blinding them from the reality of the world.  The space they are in is black, it's some sort of alien chamber with a floor that gives way to a liquid substance similar to the color and consistency of oil.  The man slowly descends into the liquid, oblivious of the trap; he continues to draw himself toward Laura who smiles at him with a lascivious gaze.  We later see a man that she's lured into the chamber float in the liquid as we see her walk over the surface, unaffected by the liquid.  The man, naked with an erection, looks around and sees another naked man floating in the distance, that man soon is broken down into some sort of slug for processing.  All that remains of him is his skin, floating in the water dreamlike as his meaty parts float down a drain into a red light.

In arguably the most disturbing and terrifying scene of the film, Laura happens upon a man on a beach.  She asks him questions about whether he's alone or not.  It's clear that what these aliens are there doing is something they wish to remain under the radar. Laura’s alien handler, a man that rides a motorcycle, deals with any possible cleanup, eliminating any evidence that they were even there.  The man on the beach notices in the distance a woman swimming out to get her drowning dog that is stuck in the rough tides.  The woman gets caught in the undercurrent as presumably her husband runs in and tries to swim out to her.  The man talking to Laura runs along the beach and jumps in to save them.  He pulls the man out of the water as his wife and their dog drown.  While this is all going on there is an 18-month-old baby sitting on a blanket on the beach crying its little eyes out.  The husband runs back into the water and drowns as Laura picks up a rock and whacks it over the head of the man she just met down the beach.  She strenuously drags the unconscious man to her van as the baby cries out, likely wondering where his mother is.  Laura is completely indifferent toward the wellbeing of the baby.  The baby is not her target so to her, it's meaningless. 

Laura lures a number of more men, who have almost unintelligible Scottish accents, making them just as alien to us viewers as they are to her, into her web of sorts but as she does this, little pieces of empathy creep their way into her consciousness.  While out on the hunt, she receives a rose from a man whose hand is bleeding, a token of human generosity.  Blood from his hand is on the rose packaging and gets on Laura's hand.  Here she adds another piece of the human puzzle while on her journey of discovering what it is to be human and how fragile that can be.  Later Laura is standing in a dark room while her motorcyclist handler thoroughly and eerily examines her, staring deeply into her eyes, the gateway to the soul.  He does this likely to see if she is operating correctly, making sure she isn’t falling prey to human emotion like the previous version of her.  

While walking down the sidewalk she slips and falls on her face. Strangers are quick to come to her aid and lift her up off the ground. She is taken a little back by their act of compassion and kindness toward her.  Human beings will often help others when they fall, we want to help when a crisis occurs, this act drifts her even closer to human impulse.

While out driving along the streets of Glasgow, Laura picks up a young man with a facial condition called neurofibromatosis.  This is the most staggering scene in the film, it's a fearless look at how we judge people in society based on looks.  This strange scene makes the audience somewhat complicit in the sense that we notice the disfigurement even though Laura doesn't.  She sees him as no different than the other men she's lured into her van.  He, of course, is quite uncomfortable at first because her behavior toward him is unusual.  As he says early on, 'people are ignorant', he also states that he’s never been with a woman and has no friends.  He would firsthand know how horrible people can be to something that's odd or off in some way.  He would see himself as an alien on a planet with a species of beings that don't accept him for who he is solely based on how he looks.

Laura brings him back to the farming chamber for harvest processing, here the man is less hypnotized than the previous men, and his gaze isn’t solely on her.  They are both naked as the man is swallowed by the black plasma.  Laura dresses and walks out the door and then abruptly stops herself in front of a mirror.  Here she stares into her eyes and is likely analyzing these newfound emotions she is feeling.  It’s likely one emotion in particular troubling her is guilt.  She looks away from the mirror and toward a fly trapped between two panes of glass banging around senselessly. Empathy becomes layered on the guilt that's already there and she begins to feel pity for the deformed man.  As a result, she releases the man, still naked into the bushes. 

Her motorcyclist handler somehow knows what Laura is up to.  They must give off some sort of sound frequency that the handler is able to tune himself into.  This ability allows him to feel the progress of her mission as she executes it.  He sets out to track her down but not before he captures the disfigured man and throws him in the trunk of a car.

Laura as a result of this newfound growth has changed.  She climbs in her van and drives off but this time without wearing her fur coat, a symbolic garb that represented the hunter.  This is the first point in the film where Laura feels afraid and unsure about what to do now that the mission is over.  Laura drives for a bit but then stops in the thick fog and abandons her van, then walks in the fog aimlessly looking around.  Her crisis is in full swing here, she’s alone and without a purpose.  She walks into a small town and goes to a diner where she attempts to eat a chocolate cake only to spit it up on the table because she is not human.  She soon meets a man on a bus who is concerned for her as she listens but likely doesn’t understand the bus driver, under the camouflage of a thick Scottish accent, expressing his concern about her not having a jacket in this cold weather.  This courteous man on the bus takes pity on her and offers her to come back to his place for shelter for the night. 

While at this man’s house she continues to open her mind to new human possibilities.  She taps her fingers to music and watches a comedy show on TV as she fails at understanding happiness and joy.  Later up in her room she studies her naked body in the mirror, the curviness of her shape, the form of her breasts, and the muscle on her back.  She rubs her skin together between each foot, she gazes at how light forms around her body, and here she embraces her physical beauty.

Laura’s handler teams up with a number of other handlers, presumably for other female aliens luring hapless men into their chambers, and they all ride off on motorcycles to track Laura and bring her in.

Laura continues her road to discovery by trying to be human as she and the man that’s helped her take a hike and go to an old castle.  Later that night she attempts to make love to this man, opening herself up to the possibility of human love.  It becomes obvious that she really has no idea what she’s doing or what she’s capable of.  This is made painfully clear when the man attempts to insert himself inside her only to discover that there is no place to insert himself.  Laura rushes to the edge of the bed and points a lamp down toward her crotch only to discover that she has no vagina.

Laura flees the house in disbelief, realizing that she can’t be a human being and can’t be with a human being.  She enters a wooded area where she meets up with a logger who warns her to watch her step.  He asks her if she’s alone and what is she doing up there in the woods.  Laura, horrified, walks off and falls asleep in a hiker’s retreat only to be woken up by the logger’s hand massaging her crotch.  Laura runs off into the woods as the logger runs after her.  He catches up to her and attempts to rape her.  Here we see again mankind’s superficial view of beauty.  The seductive music that played while Laura lured her male victims into the farming chamber begins to play over the musical score, but this time it’s for the logger for he is the hunter and Laura is the prey.

Laura is able to escape the hold of the logger but not before he grabs at her back, tearing her flesh away, revealing a black silky alien under the skin.  Once he sees her true beauty under the skin of the superficial human skin, he is appalled.  The logger runs off as a discombobulated Laura begins to remove her skin revealing her true alien form.  She holds her human head on her lap as her avatar looks up at her, terrified.  The logger returns and pours gasoline on her then lighting her on fire.  Here the film conveys how we often in society only view beauty as a physical thing that can only exist on the outside of a person, and neglect the true beauty that exists on the inside, such as the plight of the deformed man.  The tragedy of the film is when most of us, not all, discover what a person is under their skin we are turned off somehow and just want to retreat.  There is a fear of depth when we get to know someone because the more we get to know them, the more we get to know ourselves and that’s the real fear here.  Because most people are unsure of who they are and cling to the norm for security, an exploration into the depth of another person can be a terrifying proposition.

   

  

Resulting from this man’s unbridled ignorance, his fear of himself and his misguided understanding of true beauty, the alien, as a consequence, runs out of the woods and falls and burns to death in a clearing as thick snow languidly falls from the sky.  The handler continues his search for her but can no longer detect her because of her emotional transformation, as the film ends with the alien corpse burning and the snow falling down.

Under the Skin is an extraordinary achievement and impeccably executed, its out-of-body strange tone was creepy and equally beautiful, its sound quality was immaculate in scope.  The narrative of the film was simple but simultaneously complex, luring the audience into its own web just as Laura lured her victims into the liquid chamber.  The film embraces otherworldliness; it remains open to interpretation as it should.  It truly is an alien both literally and metaphorically, it’s challenging in the best possible way a film should be without providing obvious answers to the questions that the film is exploring, which is similar to its Kubrickian influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the work of David Lynch, especially with Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, and certainly the judgmental fear found in The Elephant Man.  There is also an exploration of the Lovecraftian fear of the unknown and in some cases the forbidden.  Laura is the one that knows and then soon becomes the one that doesn’t know and as a consequence is killed by someone who is equally fearful of the unknown.

The film also explores the consequences of awakening in the form of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return.  The film starts with this scared Laura figure on the floor of a white chamber while the Laura of our story undresses her.  But yet at the end of the film when the alien is holding her avatar’s head in her lap, that Laura has the same sadness consuming her face.  The penalty here is; because she feels she becomes obsolete, then a new alien is uploaded with a human form only to go out into the world and inevitably have the same thing happen to them.  The tragedy here is enlightenment by default embraces openness and like the peaceful monks of Tibet, this can be a weakness in an often cold world, where so many have not only lost their way, they never had it in the first place.  The complexity of human emotion became a process that Laura was unable to understand.  She experienced love and compassion but also hatred and evil, this polarizing dichotomy became overwhelming for her.

Under The Skin is about loneliness, it's about solitude, it's about abandonment, but most importantly, in spite of its grim reality, it's about connectivity and compassion, it's about the desire to live life and share it as well, it's also about the cost of exposure in a world that is often filled with individuals that only wish is to exploit that exposure, that vulnerability.