[Exsubmariner]

Hi Dom,
I saw this movie tonight on your recommendation. I saw a lot in it, on many different levels.

Warning ******* Possible Spoilers beyond this point *******

What I watched was a couple of characters grappling with the age old problem of man vs. machine.

By machine, I mean the apparatus, the system, that has been set up to govern human interaction. Both the players, Clayton, and Edens (wonder about the symbology of that name?) are willful participants in all the injustice that a cold and calculated legal system can dish out. They've made careers of it. They thrive on it. Edens suffers some kind of mental break (well, we think it's a mental break, but I don't think it is) that gives him a vision of the world that he has not been able to see in some time.

You see, I think that both men have lost their humanity along the way. It was somewhere back in a calculated decision they made some time ago. Edens just rediscovers his and decides that regardless of the rules of the system and the mechanations of the machine, he is going to take an unpredictable human action and to hell with the consequences. To me, he is the most vivid character in the whole film.

Clayton, on the other hand must die, figuratively, to figure out what Edens truly saw. The opening sequence is literally the moment of Claytons death. All his paradigms are gone after that point. Boundaries shifted, expanded. The ending of the movie is his human action. That is, payback against the machine. The whole machine, even the part that nutured him into what he became. From that moment on, he will have to define himself by standards that the rest of the world doesn't understand.

I identify with Clayton. This has been a year where many of my paradigms have fallen away.