Oh give me a break. Suspension of disbelief is hardly an excuse for a movie this ludicrously constructed, and for that matter, is rarely an excuse for anything except sloppy filmmaking. But, for the sake of argument, I'll go over your counterpoints one by one, as I have some time on my hands today.
The oil torches are needed to provide light for us, you say? Bollocks. The oil torches serve an important 'plot' requirement of sorts, in that they form the spoooooooky and ominous border. They aren't needed to be there at the perimeter at all; we could easily have gone the entire movie without ever needing to see them. They're thrown in BILC (Because it looks cool), which is pathetic, and not cinematographically necessary.
Candle making is easy, you say? Bollocks again! Candles, in a society like this, have to be rendered from animal fats, a messy, smelly, noxious process that, before petrochemicals replaced it, proved expensive and time consuming. Candles are far too valuable to place willy-nilly all over the house and homes, they produce smoke and start fires, making them unwise to leave unattended, etc. This is why people carried a single candle with them to bed, saved tiny stumps of wax to keep using, and generally had to be in bed at dark until the invention of the electric light, which was seen as a huge boon to mankind as it effectively freed the species of the tyranny of darkness.
You ask if I've lived an Amish life; I counter by asking if you've ever lived on a farm, or in any place where, for that matter, one's water is obtained from the ground directly. If so you would know that enormous and elaborate precautions have to be taken to provide fresh drinking water from the earth, that buildings and communities have to be planned around uncontaminated sources of H2O, that true, usable wells capable of providing sizeable volumes of water are far, far too deep to be pumped by any means save mechanical.
For that matter, what planet do you hail from, where sizeable amounts of *rainwater* can be obtained seasonally in Pennsylvania, including during the height of, oh, I dunno, winter? Snow converts to drinking water at a ratio of 10:1, for those unfamiliar with the melting of ice. Snow on the ground would be horribly fouled with animal waste and soil, and hence completely undrinkable. Cisterns, a good idea but not present in the village that we see, would prove to be a source of easily contaminated water, feeding intestinal parasites and disease unless properly chlorinated or otherwise treated with a degree of ecological sophistication unpossessed by these rubes.
The problems with paint and supplies are, as I said, two-fold: first, a level of either unthinking stupidity on the part of the writers, or, secondly, a problem that any rational being trapped in this hellish, deceptive existence could use as evidence that they were currently interred in a very, very, low-tech version of the Matrix. While societies emphasizing stupidity and conformity are remarkably good at stifling dissent, there will always be the rogue individuals neither scared of spooooky monsters nor of the contempt of their neighbors. The ruling cabal of this village seems to lack the intellect or intestinal fortitude to truly put down any organized resistance; the best they can manage is to terrify the weak-minded, the inbred, and the children with boogeymen they've constructed out of Todd McFarlane's sketchbook.
While we're at it, there is that inbreeding issue. From the picture of the ruling council and information present in the movie about some people having had small families when they moved, etc, we can glean that the membership of the initial nutjob party was somewhere in the neighborhood of, oh, 20. This is far too small of a sample to form a sustainable, genetically intact community, as evidenced by the blind, mute (virtually, in the case of Lucius, and mentioned about the dead kid), and retarded members cropping up raipidly as a result of their genetic concentration. Within a couple of additional generations we can expect them to all be drooling idiots soiling themselves in the dark.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2004-08-09 12:13 pm (UTC)The oil torches are needed to provide light for us, you say? Bollocks. The oil torches serve an important 'plot' requirement of sorts, in that they form the spoooooooky and ominous border. They aren't needed to be there at the perimeter at all; we could easily have gone the entire movie without ever needing to see them. They're thrown in BILC (Because it looks cool), which is pathetic, and not cinematographically necessary.
Candle making is easy, you say? Bollocks again! Candles, in a society like this, have to be rendered from animal fats, a messy, smelly, noxious process that, before petrochemicals replaced it, proved expensive and time consuming. Candles are far too valuable to place willy-nilly all over the house and homes, they produce smoke and start fires, making them unwise to leave unattended, etc. This is why people carried a single candle with them to bed, saved tiny stumps of wax to keep using, and generally had to be in bed at dark until the invention of the electric light, which was seen as a huge boon to mankind as it effectively freed the species of the tyranny of darkness.
You ask if I've lived an Amish life; I counter by asking if you've ever lived on a farm, or in any place where, for that matter, one's water is obtained from the ground directly. If so you would know that enormous and elaborate precautions have to be taken to provide fresh drinking water from the earth, that buildings and communities have to be planned around uncontaminated sources of H2O, that true, usable wells capable of providing sizeable volumes of water are far, far too deep to be pumped by any means save mechanical.
For that matter, what planet do you hail from, where sizeable amounts of *rainwater* can be obtained seasonally in Pennsylvania, including during the height of, oh, I dunno, winter? Snow converts to drinking water at a ratio of 10:1, for those unfamiliar with the melting of ice. Snow on the ground would be horribly fouled with animal waste and soil, and hence completely undrinkable. Cisterns, a good idea but not present in the village that we see, would prove to be a source of easily contaminated water, feeding intestinal parasites and disease unless properly chlorinated or otherwise treated with a degree of ecological sophistication unpossessed by these rubes.
The problems with paint and supplies are, as I said, two-fold: first, a level of either unthinking stupidity on the part of the writers, or, secondly, a problem that any rational being trapped in this hellish, deceptive existence could use as evidence that they were currently interred in a very, very, low-tech version of the Matrix. While societies emphasizing stupidity and conformity are remarkably good at stifling dissent, there will always be the rogue individuals neither scared of spooooky monsters nor of the contempt of their neighbors. The ruling cabal of this village seems to lack the intellect or intestinal fortitude to truly put down any organized resistance; the best they can manage is to terrify the weak-minded, the inbred, and the children with boogeymen they've constructed out of Todd McFarlane's sketchbook.
While we're at it, there is that inbreeding issue. From the picture of the ruling council and information present in the movie about some people having had small families when they moved, etc, we can glean that the membership of the initial nutjob party was somewhere in the neighborhood of, oh, 20. This is far too small of a sample to form a sustainable, genetically intact community, as evidenced by the blind, mute (virtually, in the case of Lucius, and mentioned about the dead kid), and retarded members cropping up raipidly
as a result of their genetic concentration. Within a couple of additional generations we can expect them to all be drooling idiots soiling themselves in the dark.