(Download) "They are All Heroes (Commentary)" by Arena Journal " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: They are All Heroes (Commentary)
- Author : Arena Journal
- Release Date : January 01, 2003
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 184 KB
Description
Days after the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, the executives at Warner Brothers studios decided to postpone the release of Collateral Damage, the recently completed and ready-to-roll action blockbuster featuring the not-yet governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Collateral Damage had been planned as a return to form for Arnie, whose career as an action super hero had been bogged down by too many tacky comedies and a disastrous attempt at a blockbuster--The Last Action Hero--which, as its name would suggest, was a reflexive and postmodern take on the genre. Reflexive and postmodern Collateral Damage isn't--being the tale of a happy suburban fireman whose wife and daughter are killed by a terrorist bomb planted by Colombian guerrillas at a Los Angeles bank. Nefarious politicking by the standard-issue mealy mouthed politicians lets the terrorists slip back to the Colombian mountains, so after briefly losing his marbles out of grief, Arnie decides to track them down personally and avenge his family's murder. Helped to smuggle himself into the guerrilla camp by a cynical yet amusing American expatriate low-life, Arnie sets a bomb to kill the cold-eyed sadistic guerrilla leader, only to realize at the last minute that it will blow up the man's wife and child as well. He saves them, understands that in fighting dragons he has a dragon become, and eventually dispatches the guerrilla leader in hand-to-hand combat, freeing the group's hostages and liberating the guerrilla leader's wife from her own mental bondage to him. He has transcended mere revenge to redeem a world in which careless violence has replaced the implementation of justice, state-administered or otherwise. Having been tempted to become a dragon, he has instead become a paladin--the good knight. Taken at first glance, you would wonder why the producers would be so sensitive about the film's possible reception in the wake of real terror. Collateral Damage, as the title suggests, invokes the charge of moral equivalence: in one confrontation the guerrilla leader makes the point that state bombing is acceptable whereas guerrilla warfare is terror. Arnie answers this later--for himself as well as the audience--by saving the man's wife and child. The guerrillas are Saturday matinee baddies. When a fire starts in a prison they are raiding, they display no interest in helping the nonpolitical prisoners escape a grisly death (Arnie, locked up there, saves them with a handy angle grinder), and an under-performing comrade is punished by being fed a live snake. What film could be more salutary in the wake of cold-blooded mass murder?
 "They are All Heroes (Commentary)" by Arena Journal " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}