Ghost--Shakespearian justice

Rating: 10/10 (23 June 2010)

When I saw this movie in 1990, I was impressed with that sense of justice that occurs at the end of the movie. The Ghosts carry off to hell the soul of the perpetrator of murder immediately after he had been killed by a large shard of window glass.
At the end of 1995 Richard III with Ian Mckellenan, Richard falls off a girder into what could be easily construed as the fires of eternal damnation as punishment for his evil machinations.
In Road to Perdition, Tom Hanks as Michael Sullivan gets justice for the murder of his wife and son, even to the extent of killing his own foster-father. Foster-father and Michael Sullivan are in a church basement when his Foster-father, Paul Newman as John Rooney, says to his son: "Neither one of is bound for heaven." A pivotal point in the movie reminding the viewer that Michael Sullivan does not want his son on the Road to Perdition, and hence the necessity of the ending.
These ideas of judgment in the afterlife are as old as Dante. In the Inferno, evil doers are afflicted in the afterlife in mockery of the sins they committed in the temporal life.
And that idea itself is as old as Plato's Gorgias where the Ferryman carries souls to a place of purification or a place where there is no redemption, so dark are their sins.
In a day and age where hedonism plays such a powerful role in the American soul, in a day and age where people can lose their soul to drug addiction in less time than it takes for a TV sitcom and for less money than a pack of cigarettes, these movies from Hollywood remind us of an afterlife where a soul is punished for an eternity.