For the wages of sin is death ...

Rating: 9/10 (16 November 2012)

'For the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our lord' Romans 6:23.
I have seen this movie before and I knew that this was a good movie but I did not realise how good it was until I watched it again recently, and it is not just the outstanding performances of Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, and Kevin Spacey, that make this movie brilliant. In fact, just because you load up a movie with talented actors does not mean that the movie itself will be any good, but rather the it is essence and soul of the movie that will inevitability make it stand out from the many other offerings that we are bombarded with on an almost weekly basis.
The movie is set in a city, and it could be any city. Some people have tried to determine what it is but it is clear that the location of the film is not important, but rather the content of what the film is about. The city is where people congregate and it is the place where all of the filth of society ends up. Whenever we squeeze fallen humanity into a place that is so crowded we are always going to end up seeing the worst of it. I now live in a city, and the one thing that I can say about the city is that it sprawls, both outward and upward, and in this city people do not stand out. It does not matter whether you are a freak or a different, because you are in the city and people in the city simply do not care.
This movie is also about sin and not only about how sin destroys, but how people do not care about sin, and even if you were to do something about it, the effect upon the city as a whole would be so minute that it would hardly change anything. In fact I suspect very few people walked out of this movie thinking, 'hey, sin is serious, I better stop doing it'. I don't think that this was the film's purpose of it though, but rather to open our eyes to the idea of what it around, but to also confront ourselves with the powerlessness to do anything about it.
Take for instance what Freeman says about the job of a police officer. It is not to catch bad guys, in fact that very rarely happens. Instead, it is to collect evidence and to store it away in the hope that maybe one day it will be used to convict somebody. Then we consider the discussion in the car near the end of the film, where Brad Pitt confronts Kevin Spacey with the meaninglessness of what he is doing. He asks him whether he is sent by somebody, and what he intends to do by killing innocent people, and while it may be a media sensation for a couple of weeks, people will end up forgetting about it and will end up going about their own business.
Let us now consider the murders and how they relate to the sins that these people commit. We have the glutton who gorges himself on food to the point that he becomes so obese that he cannot even leave his house. He was going to die anyway, however Spacey simply sped it up by forcing him to eat himself to dead. Simply somebody who was that fat was doomed to live a short life anyway.
As for the lawyer and the model, they were already dead on the inside, as Spacey indicates. While she went about continually making herself beautiful in an outward sense, inside she was rotting away and dying. The lawyer may have lived a wealthy and comfortable life, but it was through keeping murders out of gaol and on the street. He had no heart and no soul, he simply did not care about what he was doing, only the money that he was making doing it. While I would disagree with that to an extent, that is not the purpose of the movie.
Finally, there is the idea about the lust, in that it was not just the prostitute who died, but the man purchasing the services that died to. He was forced, at gun point, to kill this woman, and this is going to be with him for the rest of his life. The woman sells her body, and he succumbs to his lust by buying the services, and neither of them see to far ahead to realise that it will destroy them, if not physically, but mentally as well. However, the real crook, seemed to be the pimp, that simply did not care about who came into his establishment 'lot's of people come in with backpacks, it could be anyone'.
Does this movie make you think? Probably not, but I suspect that the whole point of the movie is that it sits in the back of our mind, and it is the type of movie that we will come back to again and again. Maybe it shows us that there is no hope in the world, no way of making a difference, but in the end, this world is a world without a God, and in that sense, is as far from reality as we could get.