The Orginal SAW Dilemma
I admit, I’m either the first person or the last person to see a movie. I was the last person to see SAW. However, I gained valuable insight into life from the movie. I mean really, who can’t learn from terrible things happening to more or less innocent people for two hours!
It was the main story arc (or slow story bleed out) that caught my attention. Sure the little side stories were cool, but the only lesson there was “Don’t get fucked by creepy evil people”. Now the main story had something to say.
Now the normal lessons of being a good caring person who values their own life was probably the message you’re supposed to receive. You know, the whole thing about the creepy guy with inventive traps catching you and forcing you to solve a problem with your own or someone else’s life. Good message on some level I’m sure.
Let me set up what I learned.
So you wake up in the dark. You’re cold, hungry, and wondering what the hell just happened. Then you find out some other guy is there. Between the two of you, you manage to find a light switch. Then you find a dead body in the room, a gun, and one bullet.
The question, of course, is What do you do?
This is where I deviate from the norm and instead would probably make my horribly sane and rational friends over at The Hunter Net very proud.
Once you determine your new friend chained to a pipe is really alive and breathing you have a choice to make. You can work for several hours and cry a lot trying to figure out how to get out of the rather safe room you’re in, or you can deal with the much more important problem at hand.
The dead body.
The other asshole is obviously alive, but the dead guy could become a zombie at any moment. Hell, you were just abducted and have no good explanation for what is happening in the world. And you have a little tape talking about poison in the dead guy. Poison, zombie serum… Same thing.
I would have immediately used that bullet to put a second hole in the soon to be zombie dead guy’s festering head. And as a pleasant side effect of making sure I don’t get eaten like some punk with a better plan, I also would have killed the evil guy who kidnapped me. You know, the same guy holding the “open door button” you wanted in the first place.
And this is why most movies have a distinct lack of Hunters as characters. Their keen sense of how to stop danger often diffuses the plans of evil doers much to early.
