Beyond pure obstinacy there is stamina

Rating: Null/10 (28 August 2011)

The film has aged on the political situation behind the plot: the revolutionary movements in Central and Latin America that dedicated their energy to guerrilla warfare and were answered by the US with commando operations. Now the plot has been cleaned of that background, especially after the demonstration that an operation like that in Libya can be successful when it is supporting a real movement in the country and not invading a country like Afghanistan and Iraq. Commando operations have to be limited to commando targets, and even so consequences have to be calculated.
Now what remains is a lot more interesting. The plot itself is the fact that a commando who is a meta- and mega-predator, after their operation is finished comes across a predator of another type: a lot more powerful and with means no one can imagine. The fact that it is extraterrestrial does not add one iota to the plot. A predator from out of space, that is to say from nowhere, comes and starts killing apparently what's more for the pure pleasure of killing, like man killed millions of buffalos.
Then the difference is that he is maybe not as flexible as man. He is baited and trapped into a man to man fight with bare hands. The human being manages to lead him to the trap he has prepared. The alien is yet subtle enough to smell the trap and he goes around and that's were the man is better because he more or less prepared a double trap. Solution A won't work, so Plan B can work and works, and the alien is still limited in his understanding of the situation, but is it really? The last action of its is funny, laughing like an asshole, a recording of course, and then it blows itself up into some nuclear disaster.
You can imagine the state of the field of action after the action and the state of the human fighter is close to hamburger meat and hotdog filling. But not quite. Anyway it is only a film.
What's surprising is that ten or fifteen years ago, or even in the 1980s when it came out one could think it was nothing but Cold War propaganda. Yet, after the Cold War is finished and has been finished for twenty years now, the film keeps a wider value about man: in spite of what Kurzweil may think man will always retain some advantage over any machine, because man is able to improvise, do the reverse or some transversal or counter-transversal inverse of what logic says he should do and laugh at difficulties and block suffering. Man knows when he has the time to bleed and the time to suffer. He also knows when he cannot afford that luxury. He does not know it from any logical thinking but only from some kind of deep and surnatural feeling. He knows and that is enough for him. And fear is not a human feeling, rather an animal physiological hormonal reaction that can be absolutely conquered.
That film remains a lesson of human stamina.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU