A Close Examination of One Scene

Rating: 7/10 (28 January 2012)

SPOILER ALERT! Although the plot defied logic to me, there was one scene in particular that I liked more than any other scene in the movie. I'm referring to the freeze-frame scene near the end of the movie when the camera slowly zooms out from "the kiss" to pan across the frozen-in-time faces of other passengers on the previously doomed train of death. Aside from my curiosity as to how technologically this shot was realized, there was a much deeper fascination that appealed to me. Here were the smiling faces of individual personalities rescued from an alternate reality where they smiled no more as the ashes from their fading faces fell to the floor. I immediately began to reflect on the many thousands of souls whose mortal bodies were unjustly destroyed on September 11, 2001 and then I began to forget about the total number reported (a cold statistic) and I began to imagine what it would be like to have really known each and every person prematurely released from this world on 9/11...appreciating the subtle intricacies of each man and woman and child (including future projections of the unborn ones from expectant mothers who were snuffed out before they even had a chance to see their babies take their first breath)...taking the time to clearly focus on each one of them as a unique (one-of-a-kind) child of God just as the glass lens in the scene from this film took its time to allow that same kind of visual perception of each person to slowly sink in. And it's worth mentioning here that there was also some dialogue about LIFE near this scene that helped lead this train of thought to wherever it was going. Life. Death. Life Again. I mentioned God already. He was in there somewhere...inside these thoughts of mine. I'm not sure what He was saying. But I think perhaps He wanted me to know that this is what their smiling faces look like to Him when He puts them all back together again on the other side. God is good at fixing things that are broken, you know.