What a poorly written pos this movie was.
You have to think of WHY kids become bullies in the first place. It's because either they themselves are tortured at home or their parents merely raise vain little brats. (i.e. Yuppie parents that think buying their kids everything can replace actual parenting.)
Take issues with the parents that create these little monsters, whether it's through abuse or vain neglect, not the bullies themselves.
I think it was clear that these kids were psychopaths long before the bullying, for them to so easily set aside their morals and actually commit a sustained act of cruelty without remorse proves that.
"Don't flake on me, man, they're vampires, send em' to hell." -Rafe Guttman
I agree. The bullied kids weren't just ordinary kids that turn violent and murderous because of the abuse. Sadly, there are a lot of victims of bullying and other kinds of abuse, and the immense majority of them do not retaliate by inflicting violence upon their bullies.
shareThe parents? Why do people always feel the need to blame the damn parents for everything? Some kids turn out to be who they are all on their own. Some kids have life handed to them, anything they want whether it is moral support, love and companionship from their family or even material things and they still grow up to be snotty little bastards who pick on others. Some kids are just plain bad. People need to stop making excuses and pointing fingers at others for their own faults.
shareThe parents? Why do people always feel the need to blame the damn parents for everything?
Did you realize not one single parent's face was shown from Dane and his crew's families?!? Did you see how Jack's father was as he left his house?!
"Some kids have life handed to them, anything they want whether it is moral support, love and companionship from their family or even material things and they still grow up to be snotty little bastards who pick on others."
Still? That is exactly WHY they grow up to be "snotty little bastards who pick on others"!
I love the concept of people being tormented, tortured and ripped-apart by their own inner demons.
The bullies of the world have no issue with continuing the circle of abuse. Watching them get tormented in this film made me go and put my own gas mask on.
__________
Fox News - For people who never realized what a d*ck J. Jonah Jameson is.
I agree with you, TheXeroXone. I wanted the outcasts to win, and I enjoyed seeing them torture the bullies. What goes around comes around.
Make them remember me, Jason! Make them REMEMBER WHAT FEAR TASTES LIKE!share
[deleted]
Yeah, definitely want to kill the outcasts, for being weak cowards. They get no sympathy from me, nor should they from any intelligent person. "Oh boo hoo, I got picked on, so I'll be a sadist." Please. If anything, this movie is a fine rallying cry for anyone who thinks misfits should be rounded up and shot.
share[deleted]
[deleted]
And you're trying desperately to justify sadism. It doesn't work.
share
And what you said Fugly is a fine rallying cry for anyone who thinks people like you should be rounded up and shot, which I suspect there are many. By your complete lack of compassion and understanding I assume you were or still are one of the bullies.
While I agree with you that they were cowards, I disagree with you about being weak. It takes excessive willpower to take another person's life. If you do it in a rage it doesn't, but otherwise the planning, realization of the act, and the understanding that you are snuffing out a conscious life (even if it's a worthless one) is extremely overwhelming. You would know this if you ever killed someone.
Frankly, I think that unless you have at least one notch in your belt, no one should be permitted to really state an opinion about this film or this subject. You don't understand murder, so stop talking about sadistic killers like you do.
"Oh boo hoo, I got picked on, so I'll be a sadist."
Good way of putting it. Real good.
I don't think it's as simple as "blame the parents," but it is "blame the environment". That goes for the bullies and the bullied. They're all self-absorbed - It's funny hearing the outcasts moping about what miserable lives they lead when there are millions of people their age who endure lives of unending, back-breaking labor for meager pay throughout the Third World. For the popular jerks, their selfishness is pretty obvious. The high school culture we've developed is just a product of the society we live in, which goes beyond parents and everyone else - The parents are products of it, too.
shareThe movie itself is not picking sides by the end, nor championing the outcasts' methods. It's about consequences. The movie establishes sympathy for the bullied, but their method of revenge pushes them further away from earning that sympathy. It sets up an easy good guys/bad guys paradigm at the beginning, then turns that on its head. Rather getting you to root for one side to brutalize the other, it is attempting to manuever people into thinking how they define good people vs bad, deserving vs undeserving. If all you get is rooting for one side to brutalize the other, you're not only missing the point, but avoiding it. It's meant to question how you choose sides. While it is a vicious portrayal of revenge, it's meaning is to question how you view the world.
share
Very good post and a good summary of the film.
______________________________________
The higher you fly, the faster you fall.
I always felt the analogy of a rabid dog was an apt analogy to describe the human psyche; if you beat a dog long enough, it will eventually turn on you and bite your face off. The human mind is no different; torment it long enough and it will break and attack you.
You can take a new born baby, isolated it from the world around it and abuse it, you will in turn have groomed and nurtured an innocent human being into a brutal, sadistic monster that these outcasts had become. Perhaps it's not the monsters we need to look at and more the abusers of society.