A Review of My Review of a Movie

Rating: 3/10 (30 May 2011)

Since it has been about 8 years since I first saw this movie, it may seem counterintuitive that I would review this movie now. If I had reviewed this movie 8 years ago (at 15), I would have given it 10 stars. It was the best movie I had ever seen at the time. I was way into the drug culture and had already experimented with half of a dozen. The ironic thing is that now that I have cleaned up (no drugs and no cigarettes), I find the movie to be an abstract piece of art. The abstract nature of the movie is why I give it three stars. The message is foul: drug addiction is a slippery slope and inescapable. My life experiences have shown this to be absolutely untrue. While Aronofsky does a great job with the visual and dramatic aspects of this movie and the Kronos Quartet empowers it with beautiful noises, the moral is dead wrong. It is almost as if the director has never done a single illicit drug. If you want a more realistic experience of drug addiction being inescapable and miserable, read or watch "A Scanner Darkly". If you want a more realistic experience of drug culture, watch "Trainspotting". In "Trainspotting" the characters clean up multiple times willingly and they almost make it look easy -- until you see that they slide back into it easily. The beauty of this movie is deceptive. This is the ultimate poison of the film industry. With dramatic elements, you can make a lie seem so unquestionably true. You can see this mentality seeping into modern film and 85% (according to the rank of this movie) believe the lie. The best analogy I can provide is to tell the tale of a vegetarian. This vegetarian killed a pig once and went around swinging the corpse and attacking people out with it, screaming, "Meat is murder!" How could something so beautiful be so wrong? Simple. Ask an American blonde to assimilate gravity into molecular theory.