Review of The Jacket (2005) by Mark D — 27 Jun 2010

Reasonably well done and interesting, and has a feel and pace a focus away from standard hollywood mentality. But still, not enough for me, and still working at a relatively mechanical level. Tensions between such things as what madness is and what it isn't, or what to help, or to listen, is, and what it isn't, justice vs.

injustice, humanity vs. inhumanity, and also how to live well and how to screw it up, and how easy it might be to change from one side to the other, are all brought up, but not really 'wallowed' in enough or shown in enough of their contexts where the division between one and the other is not so clear.

Kind of messy feeling at the end of it where everything lacked the right depth to connect as a whole and the characters had, for the same reason, not really engaged me enough. Don't know about you.

And the time travel aspect didn't really provide any interesting angles, simply he came back with information that helped him convince others and helped him do some good deeds. Cool, of course, but it all felt like cold circumstance with little human input.

The only real human aspect is how he helps to improve the future of a person he loves, but elsewhere he doesn't seem to care, and the part where he's shown as some kind of simple, loving, christ-like saviour figure come to tell the future and help others with a simple human, unagressive touch, doesn't really feel consistent with the rest of it.

I have a feeling we were supposed to be seeing a light of simple humanity surrounded by the delusions of others and their consequent lack of real human depth, and the folly and bad luck that also comes from that, but somehow it wasn't convincing.

He was just floating along with it most of the time and didn't seem to care that much for most others either.