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elly's picture

Define it for yourself

It must have been carefully mapped out, and we have said every film (especially Hollywood films) are planned to achieve a certain goal. Everyone may not agree with that fact but I definitey do. I find the inclusion of Darwin highly telling, and I keep thinking back to the death of the brother, and how he was represented as the more successful one in the end (even if he was playing into the Hollywood cliche) and he was killed off. What does this say about natural selection? Are they really messing with the idea of the dangers of playing into a typical ending, while referencing Darwin in the film at the same time? We kept asking whether the characters changed or evolved throughout the film, but either way this film is still fostering a dialogue about the inevitability of change (whether this is death?) or evolution (Charlie incorporating the traits of his brother?) We haven't come to definitive conclusions in this class when it comes to most of our questions (agency, evolution towards an ideal, truth, control over our own happiness etc) and yet we have all explored these issues in a way that will lead to our own definitions and answers for these concepts. This film does a similar thing for me...some of us will love it, some of us will hate it, and we will all take something different away from it, just as we did with Generosity and The Plague and even The Origin of Species.

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