So the guy had to make a choice between three pillars made up of "water" and he chose number two. What was the point of the test? Two were supposed to lead to "hell" and one to "heaven"? Did he chose number two because the boy gave him the peace sign?
shareAs far as I can tell, it was just an excuse to use a cool special effect. It made no sense, like the rest of the movie.
shareThe next scenes were cut. Arthur goes through the water portal to an underground tunnel . He is chased by 5 employees. Runs into another water coffin. Ends up in a warehouse barely makes it to the elevator(see trailer) Elevator opens to NASA office. Arlington Stewart looking down at him. The employees burst through the stairwell. Arthur runs to the final water coffin, this explodes stopping the employees and sending Artur into his bed
shareSo where are the cut scenes available to be seen? I have the DVD, but it's a long while since I've seen it, and I don't remember seeing the scenes you describe.
shareproof? link?
"laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone." - Dae-su Oh
best comment ever :-D
..constants are changing
A chase scene would have made even less sense. The boy would of had to of given the peace sign several times, or a sequence of numbers if the husband had to pick a different portal each time.
The water portals bit really doesn't make any sense at all, bar perhaps to install the idea that 'heaven' exists. Although perhaps he picked the wrong one, and ended up in hell, as his life is now a kind of living hell. His wife is dead, it is suggested that he'll never see his son again, and he is now a slave to an alien race.
I really don't get where some of you guys pulled this alien thing from. It is God or Satan that tests humanity. That's what they do. Why would aliens con people into believing eternal damnation and heavenly salvation? Why do they care about earthly morals such as murder and testing greed? They never once show aliens. Everything seemed to have pointed to God continuing his moral tests on man. I don't get how this can seem so obvious but be discounted so we can all try to explain a ridiculous alien plot. Aliens may experiment on humans in movies and try to understand us, but God and the devil are the ones that test our morals and see if there is a reason to let the world continue. Is this too cruel of an idea? I mean, most people know of how God tests humanity all through out the bible. He loves to mess with us like this for sh!+s and giggles with his betting buddy Satan.
shareClearly you've never read 2001 or it's subsequent novels. The monolith had nothing to do with theology, it was an observation post put in place by a superior species to see if mankind was noble enough to 'make the cut'. No gods, no devils. Just something we don't know about that knows about us.
To say it was god or the devil is making a completely unnecessary leap. The employers in this case may not even be more than another species living on our own planet.
Why would a god need to test anything? Isn't the standard notion of God supposed to include omniscience?
-There is no such word as "alot."
"I really don't get where some of you guys pulled this alien thing from."
From the movie. While I did find it somewhat of a convoluted mess, there are several sequences that explain (or at least imply) that an alien transferred into the Frank Langella character during the lightning strike. It kind of reminds me of another Twilight Zone, "The Monsters are due on Maple Street", in which various alien races conduct social experiments on humans.
having trust in other people, complete strangers, who gave him the number, they were more than one.
i mostly will not be able to answer your reply, since marissa mayer hacked my email, no notification
the water pillars reminded me of "Stargate"
shareMaybe someone already mentioned this but when the kid (who makes fun of Diaz's foot) is at the wedding rehearsal he puts his hand up when Marsden is picking out a gift. As far as I know there were no numbers on the gifts Marsden just has to pick one and the one that looks just like the plain paper box that the "button unit" came in is the one he picks thinking there must be sort of connection. Marsden asks someone at the party as he's got the kid clutched in his grips "why was he flashing a peace sign at me?" I think the kid was actually telling him what "gateway" to take because he was trying to help him any way he could to avoid eternal damnation. That's what I think anyway.
shareMakes sense but takes away free will. Or brings in the notion of the lack of it.
shareThey are called "water triptych coffins".. it's correct that scenes were cut and I have no idea why. Just like Donnie Darko had the chapters from the time travel book cut out which helped you understand what was going in they did the same thing here... In Richard Kelly's movies water is can be used for transport..Stewards employees used the hotel pool as a transport hub along with other eater sources and the water pillars this way to help move and process us for the aliens experiments. So very dumb to cut out vital scene just because they are strange. The audience can handle strange what they cannot deal with is being confused ..that's like tearing 2-3 chapters out of a book and having to analyze the hell out of it to fill in the dots.
shareSo now I'm seriously weirded out: is Arlington Stewart some sort of satangod or a space alien? How?
I know it's a work of fiction, but just because it's make-believe and not real surely doesn't mean it therefore must be religious. Christians, Muzzies and other associated cults don't have a monopoly on fairy tales.
My understanding is that the "aliens" are really a form of us. There was a book shown in the film (you can find out what it's called in the trivia section) that is a story about how humans are originally from Mars and then migrated to Earth.
So the "Aliens" are the original, Martian, humans examining their less evolved brethren. Arlington Stewart was hit by the lightning and allowed to "evolve" to the level of the martian humans. Because he was still in his Earth human vessel he was a hybrid of sorts and thus a perfect conduit for their bidding. A human who is native to earth but lifted up with the mars humans powers.
I think the religious undertones point to the fact that God, aliens, ghosts, all are related in the sense that they are just some representation of things that happen yet we cannot explain. They are all one in the same so it really doesn't matter which one it is. All that matters is knowing that "something" more powerful then us is in control and can decide our fate.
Really the short story and twilight episode were better then the movie. I think because it had to fill out 90+ minutes they just added a bunch of crap in to make it longer but it ultimately just diluted the core of the story.
OK. So the satan/god/dess & the unholy cohort are mere folk memories of some prehistoric race of space-alien/proto-human ubermensch, and we the mere pawns in their psycopathic melodrama?
How depressing...