Speaker 1: Buddy based lit Analyzer, and we're going to be covering
a couple films of recent note I might throw in
some Dead Reckoning as well, because we had Final Reckoning,
and then we want to do the very bizarre but
very enjoyable from my perspective, Nicholas Cage film The Surfer.
Of course, I'm a huge Nick Cage fan, and we've
got bla with us. What's up, dog? How you doing?
Speaker 2: What's up? Y'all?
Speaker 3: I'm looking forward to this one. This one fits into
your Nick Cage a cannon and I think it's a
pretty interesting movie.
Speaker 2: There's a lot to be said.
Speaker 3: It certainly fits into a lot of the stuff that
you guys have talked about recently. And then if we
get to the new Mission Impossible, I'm definitely looking forward
to that one because we saw it today and we've
got some thoughts on it, so.
Speaker 1: I do too. Why don't we start with the Mission
Impossibles if that's okay, just because I actually think The
Surfer was a better film than The Mission Impossible. I
did not think that Final Reckoning was that great. It's
kind of a lackluster showing in my view. So maybe
a little bit of background of Mission Impossibles, and then
some Final Reckoning and then we'll go to the Surfer.
Is that okay with you, you guys, okay?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So Bla tell us initial thoughts about first of all,
the overall Mission Impossible, Tom Koomb series, then Dead Reckoning,
and then Final Reckoning.
Speaker 3: Well, I think, well, there are eight parts to this.
And what's amazing is that the first film came out May,
like May twenty second, nineteen ninety six, May twenty second,
twenty four.
Speaker 2: The date is in the.
Speaker 3: Final Reckoning, which was sort of added in there, and
I remember, just I guess background. I remember watching Mission
Impossible the television show when I was a kid, and
I thought it was, you know, super cool, its spy stuff.
And so then when the film came out, I had
just finished my exams at school, and I went with
my dad, and my dad and I I had a
like a tradition of going to these Mission Impossible movies,
just like a Bond movie.
Speaker 2: That's that's kind of the thing. Yeah, exactly, And yeah,
and it's.
Speaker 3: Crazy with these movies because it you know, it's been
twenty nine. That's a whole other thing with Tom Cruise.
Speaker 1: But I'll stay with this we lost you for a
second twenty nine years and what.
Speaker 3: Well, it's been twenty nine years since this first one
came out and there are eight films, and it's really
amazing because it's starting to it's it's really started to
mirror the Bond, you know arc in many ways. And
there's something about Mission Impossible that I in many ways,
I think it's better than Bond in the sense that,
first of all, it's you know, he's an American, so
it's more it's more relatable.
Speaker 2: I guess just watching as a blockbuster.
Speaker 3: The movies are all always blockbuster movies in terms of
the movie going experience. I mean, it's a it's a
movie that I go see in the summer, and it's uh,
it's also consistent. It's pretty consistent throughout. It doesn't have
much of the silliness like that some of the Bond
movies have had with different actors, and it's the same
actor all the way through, so there's a consistency with
the whole thing. And the silliest thing in any of
the Bond movies was the best line which was in
our in the Mission Impossible was in the third movie
where he said, Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall. I
thought that was you know that that's like the silliness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get you.
Speaker 2: You and your family, remember, remember.
Speaker 3: And and Jonathan Reese Myers, and you know, there's so
many actors that have like come through the mission impossible movies.
But I think it my my initial takeaway of this
Final One was that I really, I really liked it.
I liked there's certain things I liked about it. I
liked that it was a first of all, I liked
the message at the very beginning when Tom Cruise comes
onto the screen and says, hey, folks, Catherine said Hi Tom.
Speaker 2: You know it was a personal message. And I think that.
Speaker 1: I felt it. Yeah, it was like I.
Speaker 3: Felt, yeah, he was talking to talking to me and yeah.
And I think that there are a lot of things
with Tom Cruise and and with this Final Mission impossible
that in any other movie could have gone wrong. There
was a lot of exposition, there was a there were
so many plots, there's so many people involved. But the
thing that I liked that really kind of carried over
over all that was that it seems it seems in
this movie to not be disingenuous.
Speaker 2: And the thing that I like about Tom Cruise in
general is.
Speaker 3: That unlike he's sort of to me sort of transcended
a lot of the the Hollywood messaging that we and
it's okay, let me put it this way. There's a
lot of Hollywood messaging which we've seen and you know,
you've covered, we've all sort of talked about. And his
message has been consistent, which is, there's a movie and
I want you to see it and you can have
fun with it, and we made it for you, and.
Speaker 2: So that's fine.
Speaker 3: That's fine with me. That's kind of that's wholesome. And
I liked that there were I thought there were Christian
elements in the film. There's family, there's self sacrifice.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I liked that they took the nerd from the first
movie and they sort of redeemed him and now he's
got he instead of instead of you know, he says,
what can I do to make up for this horrible
thing that I've done for you? And the guy says,
I should thank you, you know, because I found a
wife and I found purpose. And I thought that that
was that was wholesome. There was something wholesome in the film. Now,
there was a lot going on, and you know, there's
a lot of exposition, and you know, there's a lot
of stunt work, and the stunt work was cool, and
that's great for a Hollywood movie, but it was also
it mirrored the Final Bond movie in a lot of
ways because we have an entity. We've got a Luciferian
what's the anti god, it's the Prince of Lies. Yeah,
and he and Tom Cruise goes through kind of a
christ like arc throughout the thing. He goes through a baptism,
he gets tempted, he's called the Chosen One, and in
the end he you know, it was in many ways
I thought there was kind of a strange nuance with
this that it was in a lot of ways, it
was like an anti globalist message in the film because
they made these decisions. They made, you know, through their
free will that they're not going to destroy everybody or
do a fake flag on our own people, because when
you get rid of one, you know, then they're all destroyed.
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Speaker 2: I know the moves.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I was like, how long we've been in here?
And I was like, I thought it was over when
we got to the submarine scene.
Speaker 2: Movie?
Speaker 5: Yeah, right now, a.
Speaker 1: Whole other movie right now. So all right, so we
should just be recording. We will let me tell the
chat this okay, sorry about that. If you were watching
it live, it ain't gonna happen. So We're just gonna
continue with this recording and then I'll piece the videos together.
But anyway, where were we we're talking about they need
a script doctor? Go ahead?
Speaker 2: How long? Oh? Yeah? Sam?
Speaker 3: Sam said something about he was talking about a twenty
four films and something else, and.
Speaker 2: His critique was pretty good.
Speaker 3: It was like that you can go too far in
terms of your vision and how you know your form
and content. So you have to interpret the content in
terms of how you're going to film the thing. So
if your vision of the world is dark and cloudy,
it doesn't make sense to make a film that's literally
dark and cloudy, because then we can't see anything. It's
too grainy and there's nothing to see on the film.
You have to have a midway point between how the
characters see and our point of view and in a
division of the world and something that's palatable to a
viewing audience. So if you're trying to show that there
are that the global world is huge, and that espionage
is huge, and that it's a world problem, you can't
keep showing clips of like the nukes going off in
the cities like eight different times and get away with it.
We get tired of that, and you can't have too
many people to come into a story because we lose
track of you there. Now, this movie did a good
job I think of making characters seem like they have
depth and we get to know them pretty quickly, Like
the captain of the submarine. You know, was you know,
the guy from what's called Severance, which I haven't seen,
but you know, he was likable and right away and
he gives some nuance to his performance and you know,
if if if you Plus he was the black man
with a mustache, so an eighties.
Speaker 1: Black man with an eighties black mans. By the way,
a lot of top top gun in this one. Yes,
there's a lot of top gun in this and Indiana Jones.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was even a scene where he's, uh, he's
on a plane and he's about to land on the flat.
Speaker 2: You're gonna land on a flattop, mister.
Speaker 3: And he's gonna land on the aircraft carry and he
kind of he kind of cringes like, oh, but we
know watching the movie that we can't escape the fact
it's Tom Cruise and he had a whole series of
movies where he lands on an aircraft carrier at a plane,
so he wouldn't be afraid of doing that. Plus he
hangs off of an airplane later in the movie, so
why would he be worried right on the Also, there
was a there were a number of things in the
film where they show a thing and then they explain
the thing that they just showed, and so the exposition
gets to.
Speaker 2: Be too much. The audience is assumed to be too
it's tedious.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's treating us like we're done.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So the pod that he's supposed to get in when
he comes up from underwater, and you know, and then
they show they tell the whole story of what this
thing is. This is a new technology. Then they show
it and then Haley Atwell goes, what the hell is that?
You're like, well, it's the thing.
Speaker 1: That they just tak the tom Koom pod.
Speaker 2: It's the com.
Speaker 3: Pod and it's got the instructions on the front of
the thing.
Speaker 1: So like I like when he got into the old
Russian sub from twenty twelve and then he pulls down
this like hatch when he's underwater and there's like a
giant screen with like an on button and a battery. Yeah,
like an on button and a charge the sub battery.
Speaker 2: I liked it when the Russian said I have no one,
not even the dog. That was good.
Speaker 1: So Russians don't like people, their loners and they don't
even like dogs.
Speaker 2: So but I thought I liked the film.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm pretty generous with movies like this, because
I'm so we're so used to seeing such just everything
is so bad, everything that comes out is so bad.
And the summer movie there there haven't been many summer movies.
Speaker 2: I mean the last.
Speaker 3: Summer movie that had anything to do with Tom Cruise
that I really didn't like was the Twister remake. And
I remember the interview with the guy who stars in
the Twister remake, and he had been in Top Gun
Maverick and he was doing this interview and they said, uh, so,
what was it like when you got to call from
Tom Cruise, you know, to be in Top Gun Maverick.
And he said, well, I had to think about it
for quite a while. What do you mean think about it?
You we don't even know who you are, and they
wanted to put you in a Tom Cruise movie. You
just go and you do the movie. I like the
Top Gun Maverick. I didn't really like Talk Gun Maverick.
But I liked that it was a movie that was
still made during Karaka and that it came out and
that it kept movie theaters open. I think there's you know,
I like that, but there was there was obviously too
much in the movie, there was there's just too much exposition,
there's too much explained.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Also there was certain plot details and maybe it
was the editing things that didn't make sense. It didn't
make sense, and maybe I just missed it. But you know,
at the beginning of the film, Uh, how how did
Gabriel know where ving Rams was, where where Phineas Freak
was to go find him to kill him? And then
how did he know that Tom kOhm would know where
he was going to put ving Rams with the bomb?
It's just sort of like car and this this seemed
to pop up multiple times in the film where characters
would just sort of be where they're supposed to be.
Speaker 5: Like you're thinking, you're just supposed to watch him run.
Speaker 1: I think we're just supposed to be trans running with this.
You know, Roddy Chopp run that he does.
Speaker 5: Through Venice, running on the Serengetti, running, running, running, a lot.
Speaker 2: Of running, a lot of running.
Speaker 3: You pointed out before that the success of the movie
is a direct correlation to how much he runs in
the movie, and I think that's I think that's true.
I noticed that in this movie when he runs, he
added some facial pain, uh to to his running, So
he was running, for instance, away from from Ving Raiams's character.
I like the buddy thing, you know, I like the
buddy thing, you know, you know it's like a lethal weapon,
like yeah, I'm black and you're white, and that makes
it more special and and you know, I don't know.
Speaker 2: You remember running?
Speaker 5: Do you guys remember him running in the firm as
a lawyer?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Famous?
Speaker 1: What movie doesn't he run in? Jerry Maguire? Does he
running that?
Speaker 5: He probably runs.
Speaker 1: When he plays the Jewish?
Speaker 2: Yeah. His best movie is.
Speaker 3: And I think, in my opinion it's probably Vanilla Sky
because he plays against sort of plays against type, and
he plays a lot of the film with his mask on.
He plays a you know, kind of a horrid creature
and it's you know, it's real acting. I like his
tropics under because it's so it's a it's a comedy.
I think that in general Hollywood, when you there's obviously
a thing about comedic actors who want some gravitas by
playing serious roles, and that that can go wrong very quickly.
Speaker 2: We get very tired of that.
Speaker 3: But the opposite needs to be done more, where you
have serious actors who play comedic Roles. I mean, Leo
should just be playing comedies. We every drama he's going
to be in now, he cries in every and I
like Leo, but he cries in every movie and it
ends up being sort of the same character. So if
he plays a comedy, plays something against type, it's real acting.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Also, the ID like, I would like to get
into some of the esoteric themes too before we look
at other stuff. I mean, some of this I talked
about in yesterday's stream, but I'm gonna bring some of
it back up because of course, this series has quite
a few esoteric elements all the way back to the
first one. If for those who don't recall the theme,
the actual mcguffin that they're after is an AI chip.
People don't remember this, but the nineteen ninety six or
seven installment was actually way ahead of its time in
terms of this, uh you know, amorphous Unknown Chip. That's
the famous scene that everybody remembers, where you know, Tom
Komb gets down in the CAA facility and he's hanging
over the you know, over the sensor floor to get
the and it's over an AI chip, And I like
that we went full circle at the end of this
series where we're back to AI being fully advanced, it's
gotten loose. It's this sort of sky net type of entity.
I didn't notice though, going back through it until Jamie
and I watched it again yesterday. The first one, or
the first part of the conclusion, is that there's quite
a bit to do with cryptography and cryptocurrency, which I
had missed when I first watched it when it came
out in the theaters a year or two ago. And
I think that's interesting because it's a very gnostic themed film,
and that's not foreign to Tom Cruise films. If you
watch The Mummy that had a lot of esotery agnostic
themes in it. This one, it's more so that Tom
likes to play the sort of rebel angel figure that
goes into the system to cause the chaos. He's an eight.
In fact, Rebecca Ferguson calls him the incarnation of the
principle of chaos in Dead Reckoning, so that lets us
know that he is this sort of dark angel figure,
this sort of one that fights against the demiurge that's
in this film, the entity that will imprison everybody in
this depopulation agenda, which to Bela's point. I'd like that
they returned to the notion of anti natalism and the
total deepop agenda which had come up action in installments
four and five, where you had a doomsday cult of
the Apostles that wanted to get rid of all of
humanity or reduce it to a great reset. In fact,
they even use the terminology back to Cobalt and then
the Apostles they want to nuke everybody start over a
great reset, and what do you know, the AI wants
to do that exact same thing.
Speaker 3: It has a lot of similarities to the Final Bond movie,
you know, with deepop Kronka. I mean, the fact that
the Final Bond movie was pulled from cinemas in summer
of twenty was not due to the fact that people
weren't going to the movie theater. It was due to
the clearly due to the fact that the movie was
about the very thing that was happening I forgot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And also that you know, the character's name is
Lucifer in the film, creating this sort of neo gnostic
poison garden.
Speaker 2: And it's interesting.
Speaker 3: About the the sort of rebel angel thing because Shae
Wigham brings that up. Shae Wigam's character brings that up
in this final movie that you know, we realize that
you are about protecting your team, which is noble. He
wants to protect the people that he loves. But it
also shows in the film, in the series of films,
that everywhere he goes he's causing those very problems that
he has to save in the end, and that that
seems to be emblematic of all intelligence operations in the
first place. I mean, even at the end of the film,
Henry Ernie's character like gets the what do they call
the thing, the podcaster or whatever the thing is.
Speaker 1: Now I'm trying to figure out the different objects, like yeah,
whatever that thing is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he's only like a game.
Speaker 5: Boy the iPod. And he's always trying to go rogue,
Like he can't go rogue enough from his team, from
the government. He's always like trying to be like everyone
we have to.
Speaker 1: Write, I mean, because nobody else knows the big picture.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he says, you know, he even says to him, look,
I'm not here because of what happened to my dad
or because of I want to gain some sort of
retribution against you. We'll have our reckoning, but I'm here
because you won't follow orders. And that's one of the
major themes of Specops and you know any of these people.
You know, I'm covering the Narnia series right now, And
even in The Magician's Nephew, the book starts off with
Uncle Andrew's character, who, just like Jadis the White Witch, says,
we're above you know what Kurt says in Apocalypse Now,
I'm above your lying, petty morality. The rules don't apply
to me. So the rules don't apply to him. He
has to make decisions on his own. He has to
go rogue and be inventive. And that's when you know,
you've you've covered the history of CIA and m I
six and all these things in World War Two so much,
and they sort of rely on people who do follow
rules or come from a certain place, but also are
able to break rules when it sort of suits the need.
And so his character certainly does that throughout. You were
mentioning the first movie that you're right, the first movie
is so beautiful. It's a beautiful movie, and it's so
brilliant because it's so first of all, it's so obviously
Brian to Palma in the best way. It's a recognizable
Brian to Palmer film. Even the sheene of the movie
and the way that it looks at age, it's it's
aged so well. But like you said, it's a it's
a classic almost noir espionage film with a pretty close
knit cast of characters, and the locations all suit the story.
So we're not going, you know, on location somewhere just
so we can have an excuse to go to South
Africa or whatever it is. We're going to these places
because the plot will take us there, and it was.
The first movie is much more about, like the way
that the characters having this insular feeling, this interior drama
that plays out in the exterior so it we can
see it on their faces, the decisions that they're making,
Like when he runs to the bridge.
Speaker 2: And the girls car explodes.
Speaker 3: You know, it's an explosion, but it's a thing that
means much more to the character and to his team
than just the fact that there's an explosion and we
got to go somewhere else.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that all throughout the Pallem One, there's
these sort of iconic scenes and images, not just you
know him sort of hanging like a spider, you know,
in the Spider's Web of that facility in the CIA.
But you know, you've got the scenes in Prague, as
you're mentioning at the beginning, You've got you know, the
the fish tank blowing up and him running. I mean,
all those are really well done action sequences for a
film that's not focused on action. I wish we'd have
got something.
Speaker 2: Out Dale too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wish we'd have got something more like that
than all of this just sort of like, I don't know,
I feel like I'm watching a die hard movie and
I'm not watching a spy movie. But I'd rather it
be a little more weighted towards the espionage stuff. But
you mentioned the characters in their backgrounds and espionage, you know,
for those that don't know, Ethan Hunt's based on E.
Howard Hunt, the famous spy rumored or proclaimed self proclaimed
to be involved to some degree in the JFK event.
And I think now that we've had the declassification of
those documents, we can see that he may have played
a role. But it does seem like there was a
certain Middle Eastern countries that played a pretty big role.
And there you go, there's one of his novels, right,
and James Jesus Angleton was certainly one of the key
players that appears as well with certain Middle Eastern countries.
But I wanted to mention too that I'd forgotten that
many of the characters like Phineas Freak or Ethan in
the in the story were recruited precisely because of their
sort of criminal background, right, So they're actually recruited because
they were involved in shady activities. If I recall Ethan,
I can't recall if Ethan really was shady or if
he got framed. I think he says he was framed
or something like that. Yeah, it was like his previous
you know, Life and Something with Gabriel exactly. And am
I right that Gabriel was in one of the earlier
installments as a villain.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's in which which he's in, uh not rug Nation, He's.
Speaker 2: In He's.
Speaker 1: Okay, So so he had he had popped up before.
I do like all the throwbacks in this this final installment,
which we knew that they would do that, but they
did it without being too cheesy, which I appreciated. But
I did want to mention too that in the first
one of the conclusion. A lot of what it was
said about the AI, I thought was pretty pretty revelatory.
I don't think obviously AIS are going to be sentient,
but it talks about, you know, as we said, the
series begins with AI, it ends with AI. We have
multi signature cryptography going on in terms of Bitcoin, that's
very important. We have the mentioning that this can access
and take down the photo Reserve. It can infiltrate all networks,
including nuke's, you know, every government computer, et cetera. It's decentralized.
It's very much like the way if you read about
Stuck's net, it's like a megastucks net, which is interesting
because we just watched Black Bag with Kate Blanchett and
Michael Fassbender, and in that film they mentioned stucks Net,
which was the Israeli let loose bug into the Iranian
nuke facilities in twenty twelve, and they mentioned that this Sebastopol,
you know, sub sank in twenty twelve. Not that those
necessarily connected, it's just weird that it was twenty twelve.
And in some way we have parts of this AI
that are sort of fragmented. You gotta get the parts together.
One of the key elements is the key, which is
these cruciform keys that fit together very Indiana Jones', very
you know, esoteric hermetic type stuff. And so it's almost
like to be to control the deity is to control
the tech and the secret. So you gotta have secret nosis,
you gotta know the secret terms, the secret words. You
got to put together the puzzles of cryptography, and you
can become a Diusex mashkin a gone from within.
Speaker 5: He went from all of the different elements to like water, air,
like he fought underwater, in the air, in the earth.
Speaker 1: Interesting, Yes, we had underground bases. That was an I
don't know if we shu seems like we should have
had an undergrounds and spy movies, but we haven't. This
is like one of the first ones. Half and underground base.
Mount Weather's a real thing. In fact, you know, Alex
is always mentioning Mount.
Speaker 2: Weather Weather r.
Speaker 3: Mount Weather's a famous place in Virginia that we drive
past whenever we're on trips, and there are I mean,
there was the secret bass that was revealed through that
journalist that the green remember the you ever heard of
the I talked to Jamie about this. Jamie, remember the
Greenbrier Hotel.
Speaker 2: There's a hotel.
Speaker 1: The hotel ing ground Bays. Alex talks about this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and uh, everyone I know goes there
on vacation.
Speaker 2: They've always been there.
Speaker 3: And then it was revealed that you know, it's this thing,
and and it's so obvious when you go there. Now
you go into the ballroom and there are nuclear hinges
on the door and you just open it up and
it's kind of full.
Speaker 2: You know, it can it can hold the full lighthouse.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you saw it, but I don't
mean to cut you off, but just on this point.
Did you see that maybe a few weeks ago Tucker
had Catherine Austin fits on about underground bases.
Speaker 2: I didn't see it.
Speaker 1: I saw that they did an old deep dive and
she went pretty heavy into dumbs, which we haven't heard
much about. This is like that's like twenty twelve era
conspiracy stuff, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, there's there's of course Admiral Byrd and the
underground bases and Arctica. My uncle in Mississippi, who was
a farmer, was in the Air Force in the fifties
and sixties and his job he passed away, but his
job he was tasked with making a list of all
the people that would go in the bunker in case
of a nuclear strike. And there was one there was
one space on the end that was left planket. He
couldn't find anybody to fill it, so he put himself
in it.
Speaker 1: So the last bunker. Okay, yeah, put your name and
that's funny. Yeah, yeah. Alex. Actually this week was he
interviewed dark journalists and they talked about underground bases this
last week, and the only point I want to say
about that was Alex brought up the fact that when
THEO Vaughn had Zuckerberg gone, Zuckerberg was talking about his
underground tunnels and base that he has in Hawaii that
he had built, and Alex was of course talking about
how you know, this is what conspiracy theorists have talked
about for decades, is the you know, breakaway society that
the elite have in the case of some global.
Speaker 3: Phenomena final reckoning, has the doomsday vault. You know, they've
got the seed vault.
Speaker 1: Oh, the seed vault. Yeah, great point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's also got speaking of the esoteric you know,
my friend Maddie and I covered the last season of
True Detective which was set in Alaska. You know, it
was amongst the Inuit, and they included they included that
storyline in this one. The many of the films include
the Underground, the the literal London Underground, and a lot
of the a lot of these films, like you remember
in in Skyfall where they go minimalist and so then
they go to this underground you know, it's the Secret Station,
Churchill Secret Station, and that sort of mirrored in New
York with they have that train station under the Waldorf
Astoria where the President goes on the train line straight
from Penn Station in case of a nuclear attack. And
then there's all the ones in Vegas and all this
and all that in La La has.
Speaker 1: All these underground tunnels too, and reportedly also as Jamie
pointed out to me, even the Als actors have supposedly
sort of underground tunnel systems that they take to get
to places that so they won't get hung up.
Speaker 3: I did like in the film when they showed what
was supposed to be Cheyenne Mountain and then they show
the Minutemen facilities and they've got like wild horses running
to indicate that it's China Mountain. So they had the
nuclear football in this movie again, that that the nuclear
football is in everything. It's like one of those boomer
points that's in every film about the end of the
world where the part you know who's going to contry
he was in control of the nuclear football, and they
had the Curtis le Maye nick Offerman character, you know,
who's like, just do it, you know, ten twenty million
dead tops. And I thought what was interesting was that
with Angela Bassett and that sort of cast of characters
in the room, which, by the way, why did it
get so sweaty?
Speaker 2: You know, they're in the room. They come back to.
Speaker 1: It, well, because the entity can hack the air conditioning,
so that's right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, But she says that somebody will have doubt, somebody
will try and ruin this because there'll be a doubter basically,
and it ends up being her. So she ends up
being the one who is about to press the button
and then decides the last minute that, oh, you know, coment,
you know, maybe I don't need to nuke everybody on
earth just to save nobody. But I did think there,
I mean, I thought there were deeming elements in it.
I just again, I really liked the nerd character from
the first one because when they go into his place
on the island in the Baring Sea, when they walked
into the hut, the first thing I thought was like, wow,
that looks really cozy. There's a lot of books. They
got every movie ever made in this place. They're probably
all Tom Cruise Paramount movies. And then, of course, like
you said, the evil Russians are already they're attacking, So
there was it was two, there was you know, they're
they're in the Baring Sea. And then they got to
go to South Africa. Maybe that's predictive programming for what's
happening in South Africa now or something. I don't know,
but it just it was such a contrast from the
first movie, which is bound to happen with a huge
series and Tom Cruise is getting pretty old. I saw
an interview with Jimmy a clip from Jimmy Fallon, and
I thought this was pretty good. He said, so what's
the movie about? And he said, well, there's a mission
and it's impossible, so that's that's the movie.
Speaker 1: Well, I forgot too on that crypto point when we
watched the previous one that the Haley Atwell character she
gets paid in crypto, and Tom Cruise mentions a four
million dollar cryptocurrency payment that's going to be given if
she's able to give that key to Gabriel, And I'd
forgotten that Phineas freak. He's a cyberpunk, cyber techno, cyber
pagan type of guy. And that's also the ethos from
which bigcoin comes, right, So bitcoin comes from the cipher
punks who were you know, like a Songe and Adam
back and these characters who were basically a kind of
being Raim's character in reality. And at the beginning of that,
when you had Simon Peg decoding the cylinder cipher, which
I liked, I thought that was really cool to go
this route of like ancient cryptography, because cylinder ciphers go
back to like Julius Caesar, they had those back then
and in order to you know, open messages for the
king or whatever Dan Brown likes to use, yeah, Dan
Brown type stuff. And I thought it was going to
go in the direction of Dan Brown, given the fact
that we had the rabbit's foot being what you think
is this anti god If you remember in the Dan
Brown stories Anti matter is like the anti god and demons,
Angels and demons, you know that that. Yeah, it's like
a CERN thing, but I like that it ended up
being AI and not some stupid bioweapon or something from CERN.
Speaker 3: Well, it was kind of a combination of the two
because because the way that the entity was presented on
the film. In the film was like you were looking
into the CERN into the Hadron collider.
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was an eye, but it was also it
just also had a very lucive, you know, Satan tempting
Christ sort of air to it, because we see he's tempted,
he's offered everything in the world, he's offered complete control.
We see all these sort of uh he says, there's
infinite possibilities, so we almost see like a kind of
multiverse floating in front of him.
Speaker 2: He also to do that he die, He essentially dies.
He goes into a.
Speaker 3: Coffin, and the the way that he is inducted into
this sort of thing is like as almost you and Cameron.
Speaker 2: I mean, he's electro shocked into it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was like we were talking about mk Ultra
when he got into the matrix coompod there. Yeah, so
it is another resurrection motive the Sarcophagus.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, with an Egyptian, a black Egyptian of city,
and a pharaoh mask. Well.
Speaker 1: One other side note that I didn't remember they brought
this up in part two, but in Dead Reckoning when
I went back and watched it, Gabriel is hidden by
the AI when Tom came is wearing those Google glasses
in the airport. And that's interesting because I had just
on Friday's Last Friday's Lord Voldemort. I went into the
Ray Kurtzwild book where he talks about how when this
AI rolls out and virtual reality rolls out, especially if
it becomes nanotech, he says, the danger is that the
AI will be able to interfere and inter seed incoming
signals and control what we actually perceive. And he says
that's the big danger because then it's total mind control.
And it vibed perfectly with what was in Dead Reckoning,
And then they recalled that in regard to this matrix
scenario when Tom Koom goes into this sort of matrix pod.
Speaker 3: You know, I just I just realized this movie is
in many ways almost the exact same plot as Oblivion
because the sarcophagus comes down, there's an entity. Instead of
multiple agents coming after you, it's just you know, their clones.
And then the sort of like the DARPA bot drone,
the Hunter Killer drones coming after you. There's a kind
of resistance. There's who lives in an underground base in
the film. But you're right, Tom Cruise does a lot
of these types of movies.
Speaker 1: Well, let me let me know that Edge of Tomorrow
where he does a similar sort of fight with an
archontic demiurge Oblivion. He fights the Demiurge and then you
I think you got similar themes here. But if you
remember when the AI reveals itself with something Jamie pointed
out yesterday, it's when they're at the techno where at
the rave, but they're in a church. It's a it's
a it's a rave instead of a giant it's like
Saint Mark's cathedral. M do you remember that in Dead
Reckoning when the AI when they have the meeting, when
they're all parties are gathered and they're at this giant rave,
it's at like a giant cathedral. So it's in a tuit.
It's a religious the god of the from within, that
the day of sex Machina is revealing itself at this
church and raves.
Speaker 5: And techno is part of the cyberpunk culture that all.
Speaker 1: This case exactly. Yes, that replaced relaced computer music.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so they bring you the New God.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the major cave rave right. Yeah, yeah, it's
the Church of the Future is essentially.
Speaker 2: What Well, doesn't it make sense?
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, the movie really does hint on
the fact that. And there's that one line when he's
in the in the in combat when he's finding the
guy and he says, you know, stay off the internet,
or or get off the Internet or something like that.
I didn't catch at the very beginning. He said something
about multiple personalities in the very.
Speaker 2: Start of the film. But it makes sense, you know,
with the.
Speaker 3: With the just theologically speaking, that the anti Christ seems
that I don't know, correct me if I'm wrong, but
if the.
Speaker 2: Antichrist, if the anti Christ, you know, were.
Speaker 3: To come soon or something, and if just say in
terms of we're watching a movie and that's emblematic of
the way that it is, then wouldn't it make sense
that the you know, you've talked about the new religion
and the sort of religion of AI and people worshiping
some sort of entity, some sort of spiritual entity from AI,
and it would make sense that the Antichrist is not
a created being. It's a simulation or some sort of
inversion or perversion of an entity that arises out of
through technology.
Speaker 1: I think that in the Orthodox tradition, we do believe
that there will be a person who ends up being
the final Antichrist, but it certainly could include an antichrist
be system that definitely utilizes the synthetic and utilizes AI
for you know, large skill tracking and tracing and control.
That's definitely on the table, I'm sure. But I mean,
I think the you know that I wanted to ask
you a question because I just remembered that in the
in the film when it says multiple personality, what was
that in reference to? Was it Tom Koumbe giving exposition?
Speaker 2: I think so. I think it was a reference to.
Speaker 1: It was part of right it had multiple personalities.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was a reference to AI, and it was
a reference to the fact that you're what you were
just talking about with your vision of people changes, so
we see a person that ends up being a different
person that that you're tricked into scene. But also that's
a common theme throughout all of Mission Impossible. That was
pretty predictive and revelatory, I think with it wasn't face swap,
it was literally latex mask. And when the first movie
came out, that seemed very fantastical. It seems like something
that was just only in a movie could never happen.
But now we see that that's probable in a lot
of cases. I mean, I saw a picture of Tyler
Perry the other day with or whoever's inside of Tyler
Perry at this picture clearly with a line with a
line here where it was a different person inside of media.
Inside of Tyler is like four layers of people wearing
a lab.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, I think the yeah I remember now
it's when Tom's explaining at the beginning, I guess for
the benefit of the boomer audience who doesn't remember the
rest of the Mission Impossible series, he's explaining that this
AI has basically become a kind of a deity. It's
the Lord of Lies he calls it later on, but
he says it's multiple personalities because it can be anyone
anywhere and change and you know, morph into whatever. So
it's kind of the superspy, right, the AI is kind
of the super spy because it's like, you know, playing
sixty six dimensional chess. It's way ahead of you. So
you get this determinism theme versus free will theme that's
always been in the series. And this was this was
another thing that Tom Komb loves to sort of pioneer
in his films. This was in Oblivion and it was
in the Edge of Tomorrow. There we go, we lost him,
we lost you again, but you're back now. So in
Edge of Tomorrow, right, he's caught in this cyclical you know,
Groundhog Day loop, but he's fighting this alien entity that
traps you in this prison and you got to figure
out the way to you know, undo this matrix that
you're in. And it's a very gnostic theme. I would
add that Esoteric Hollywood three has an analysis of Oblivion,
Edge of Tomorrow, the entire Mission Impossible series, except for
this one because it just came out and I'd already
finished the book. So Mission Impossible and all these Tom
Cruise films, including Vanilla Sky, are all in Esoteric Hollywood three.
You can get signed copies in terms of pre orders
at the website. Right now if you sign up. But
what do you make of the cyclical sort of breaking
free from the determinist scheme which is mentioned many times
in Final Reckoning Because it is not written, it is written,
it is not re right. So code is written. Phineas
Freak writes code that ends up being kind of the
defeater for the code of the determinism that the AI
wants to enforce to upset free Will. Tom Cruise, of course,
is the agent of chaos, the incarnation of chaos, she
calls him. And so he represents this freedom, this rebellion,
this revolution. He will always fight for freedom. Phineas Freak's
final line is, we are the masters of our own fate.
What do you make of the determinism free will stuff
in terms of the world of spycraft and AI and tech.
Speaker 2: Well, I think that it transcends the spy tech and.
Speaker 3: Espionage and films because it's an archetypal theme. I mean,
it's even The final line from Phineas is a reference
to William Arnest Tenley, probably my distant cousin, who wrote
the poem Invictus, which is, you know, I'm the master
of my fate. I'm the Captain of my soul. One
thing that always bothers me in these films is the
fact that they are clearly fighting against their fated life,
like it's written, everything here deterministic, you have no choices.
But then they conflate that at the end by saying
they they think that fate is somehow different from destiny,
and so then they say, but you're the master of
your destiny, which is the same thing. And we can
see this sort of this sort of dichotomy happening all
the way back into Anglo Saxon literature. There are two
of the earliest English poems are called The Wander and
the Seafarer. They're around the time of Beowulf, and Beowulf
struggles with this about and we see these in these
two narrative poems because and many scholars think that it
would be two people, two different people, who wrote the poems,
because three quarters of these narrative poems are about fate
and how for instance, the Viking never feels at home.
When he's home, he wants to be out on the sea,
and when he's out on the sea, he wants to
be home with his family. It's the ubi sunt motif
where those who have gone before there's mutability, everyone's gone.
But then at the end of the poem there will
be an explicit Christian blessing or a discussion of the
way that God controls the world and sets the planets
in motion. Beowulf begins like this because it begins with
where Grendel comes from. Grendel comes from a cane spawned
from Kane, So it gives a biblical notion to do
you know, it describes Genesis that talks about this, but
then Beowulf becomes this sort of agent of fate. But
in reality, I think that that sort of sets the
stage for an archetypal motif throughout literature and film, because
really the poems were written at a time where if you.
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Speaker 3: It wasn't a monk who found an old Anglo Saxon
pagan poem and then added something to it. It was
just at the convergence, at the crossroads of where Europe
was becoming Christianized. So at eight hundred and one thousand
and eight hundred two about one thousand and a d
you have these people who have lived in a pagan
world and they've moved this mass migration of pagan people,
and they have all this stuff and culture and then
but now they've been Christianized, so they're trying to make
sense of how their world is supposed to be in language,
and we're still sort of dealing with that all the
way to now. When you watch films, you know, you
can't have, you know, is my perspective. I guess you
can't have people who rebel against being an agent of
fate but then still believe they are destined to do
the thing because it's written it's you have free will
and you make choices, and that's part of the freedom
that we're given by God. So the thing is you
you either are in this journey and things you do,
things that glorify Christ, or you are a slave to fate,
and that's sort of where the conflict comes.
Speaker 1: I think, Yeah, that's exactly the line of that I was.
I was hoping you would go into some of the
literary tradition on that, because in terms of tech, the
reason I mentioned spies is spies obviously are important in
the history of literature more recently, the last you know,
one hundred and thirty years of literature with you know,
we cover The Secret Agent by Conrad on my channel
not too long ago, because it's not technically the first
by a novel, but it's one of the earliest of
you know, modern literary spy novels, and spy stuff actually
comes to dominate society in modernity in ways that most
people don't even know now, I know, you know, our
audience knows this. But computers themselves come out of the
spy world. They come out of arpenet ways to engage
in cryptographic communication that can't be intercepted by the other party,
by the enemy, by other states, AI and all of
the supercomputers that we have that comes out of the
NSA and the Cold War. You have people like William
Bennie that Richard Grove has done many interviews and documentaries
with Benny talking about how the NSA and AI really
you know, congealed out of the Cold War and a
lot of the stuff that he did for the NSA
back in at that time and at that era of
the Cold War. Benny talks about how it was all
about the notion of freedom versus slavery. And what's funny
is that even a film like Dead Reckoning, Final Reckoning,
even that still harkens back to the Cold War. You
have the presence of the Russians in the film being
this potential villain. You have these you know, old you know,
number stations and Soviets sonar sites all over the globe
that are very important for the the final sequence and
the idea I think being that well, we have to
get past our you know, nationalist you know limitations, and
we've got to have this new future. We got to
shape hands. If you notice that kept coming up where
Tom Cruise kept offering his hand. Let's be friends. We've
got to trust each other. We'll never get out of this.
The AI is the one that's dividing us and keeping
us separated. We got to work together. So a potential
sort of global esteem there. But last thing I want
to say on this was that also, as we said,
spies come out, the world of spycraft is also an
imprisoning world. If you remember back to Secret Agent right,
which is kind of a dark satire Verloc, who is
the sort of the main tragic character. Verloc is a slave.
He's handled by these people that have dirt on him
and have controlled him. His handlers have controlled him his
former foreign government for the last thirty forty years of
his life. Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt, the recruit who
is also he has handlers, the CIA, the NSA, right,
the people above him, the Director of National Intelligence. Spies
are not three people. Grace goes from the world of
organized crime and thievery to becoming now handled by the
IMF and that's her only option. So there's this within
the notion of the spy itself is the denial of
his freedom and being owned by some master, some superstate,
some clandestine organization. And likewise, the world of cryptocurrency also
comes out of the crypto spy world as well, and
we just don't even like. The spy world sets the
stage for where the world goes, and we most of
us don't even see that. A lot of the gadgets
of James Bond, that Q you know, shows us becomes
normal technology twenty thirty years later. So the spy world
is really telling us the future ahead of time.
Speaker 2: And then well there's a reason why I'm sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 5: Well they were contrasting that with now you can't trust
the digital stuff.
Speaker 1: The entity was gonna make AI fake news of everything
in history, so you can't trust the internet now.
Speaker 5: He was even using Morse code and all the like
throwbacks of like classic spies.
Speaker 1: They had to use old tech. That's right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he had everything analog and then he had put
it away in his brain. He'd remember the coordinates to
this place. There's a reason why Tom Cruise spends a
lot of the film in handcuffs because he's he's shackled
like that, you know, whenever he and that happens throughout
all of the films, whenever he's transported from one place
to another. I mean, that was one of the major
plots of Mission Impossible three, that he's constantly in the
back of a black van or a suburban and he's
constantly having to escape from his own people. And that
I think ties into certainly the history of espionage with
the esoteric and the occult. I mean, the you know,
you've talked about the way that, for instance, the mob
and the world of spot sort of work hand in
hand because of Omerta. So there's a built in code
of silence and secrecy with that, and these intelligence people
become sort of dark monks. I mean, you remember the
you remember the Elizabeth movie where Francis Walsingham, who's you know,
the great father of English spycraft, is constantly pictured with
these people who are they look they either are literal
monks or they're dressed like monks and mixed in with
even going back to the templars, there's a the way
that the system works with money and with moving people
around and with you know, the global world at the time,
and with war with war is mixed in with the
warrior monk class that like you were just saying, with
with spies, the trade off seems to be to the
average person that these are people who give up their
lives for their country, but in reality it seems that
they are selling over their and everything that they care about.
So even Tom Cruise, I don't remember if it's admission
impossible or in Night and Day he did that other
movie Night and Day with Cameron Diaz where they go
to his house and they're talking to his parents and
his parents think that he's dead. He can't even talk
to his parents. He has no family, no friends, His
wife is compromised in part three, so near the closest
thing is for him to take care of his team,
but that's all he has, so there is there's nothing
personal and sacred to the people that are involved in this.
Like you said, they're completely shackled by their secrecy.
Speaker 1: I was wond or two and I just don't remember
the detail. Do we not see Tom Cruise at the
end with Dominique Monaghan because she had moved on or
was it simply because everyone around him is in danger?
Why do we not see him back with his wife.
Speaker 2: I don't know, I don't I don't know.
Speaker 1: Well it soon I think Fallout or the one after
where they go to that u N encampment and he's
having that fight with the with the British Depopulation advocate
and you know, she's working as a un AID worker
and they have this conversation about you know, oh I
missed you, blah blah blah, and then I think she's
moved on, like she's got a new dude, and he
realizes it's not fair to her to, you know, for
him to pop up every five years and be like,
you know, hey, let's get late or then see you
know what I mean, Like he wants her to have
a life, and so I think maybe that's the explanation.
Speaker 3: It's also one of the themes that occurs in all
the Spy movie I mean Spy Game with Brad Pitt
and Robert Redford is partly about that. The Ray Fines
movie where they're dealing with the v I r Us
in Africa. Remember the constant Gardner deals with that, you know,
the people that are in this life can only be
with other people in the life.
Speaker 2: And like in black back bag exactly.
Speaker 3: You can't even trust the person you're with is not
going to sell you out for the greater thing, like
like in Bond with Em you know, with his with
his his mother and his daddy state he has no
family anymore, and they they are his family. He's taking
his childhood, he's taken away. Turning, of course, it turns
out like an Austin Powers that his uh, his brother
is the Lucifer character.
Speaker 2: That they adopted.
Speaker 3: By the way, speaking of speaking of Austin Powers, probably
the best spy movie with Tom Cruise is in gold Member.
You remember at the beginning of the film when he's
playing he's playing the He's playing the Austin Powers character
in the movie. Within the movie, Tom Cruise, Tom Cruise,
Tom Cruise plays Mike. He plays Mike Myers parachuting into the.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I would say too. Last couple of thoughts,
I mean, I think the the idea of AI becoming
sentient is kind of stupid. I'm kind of tired of that.
I think, you know, we got that with Skynet and
we know that Terminator. There was actual consultation between DARPA,
the Pentagon and Kathleen Kennedy and Gaye Anne heard different
people involved in the later Terminators. Not so much the
first one, which is kind of a almost kind of
an independent film that was a Neil Nowak classic. But
by the time we got Terminator Too and James Cameron
and working and talking to the Pentagon, I think we
were getting more and more revelations of, you know, actual
plans and possibilities of where AI might go in terms
of depopulation and it being programmed. And in that series
with Skynet, we had the joining of Ben Witherington with
the AI to be the sort of savior figure that
the one that had Christian Bale. I forget where it
went after that, because they got they got really, really
bad by the time of the last one, with Arnold
basically being a guy like the the T eighty eight
hundred becomes a blind salesman. He sells blinds and he's
he's like cock. Yeah, his name is Carl, Carl, Carl,
the cock who sells blinds. It was crazy, but you know,
to just to round it out with the idea of
AI becoming sentient, you're never going to get code that
comes alive alive. I think that's really stupid, But I
do think you could have the potentiality of you know,
anti natalist depop agenda people, you Malthusians who do want
to program AI to perhaps depop something like we see
in you know, Avengers or Winter Soldier. You have that
scene that theme going on in those films. That's definitely
a possibility, but not not what we see with like
AI coming alive or something like that.
Speaker 3: But well, I think that this all has the veneer
the scam, the veneer of like a scam the way
that it's sold to the public now, because like you
were saying, there's this narrative, there's this ultra narrative now
that is completely infiltrated every aspect of advertising and everything
else that you see where it's coming. It's the greatest thing.
It knows more than you know, so there's nothing you
can do about it. You know, this stuff about like
I don't know about the Nvidia chips or whatever, but
the new Nvidia spine that they have, which has you know,
millions and billions of terabytes in it and has all
the computing power of anything in the world and all
that kind of stuff, it just seems like it's a
narrative that's sold to people so that they will begin
to doubt their own abilities and doubt the future and
possibility of what humans can do. And no matter what,
you can't get past the point that the the DARPA,
you know, the alphabet inc. DARPA bots or whatever, the
dancing robots. It's like Sam said, it looks like the
video is the product. It looks like there are no
bots that could go into your house and they don't
have dexterity. You're not going to have bots, you know,
fixing the telephone lines when it takes ingenuity and dexterity
to do those things. Maybe you know, we could, of course,
we'll continue to have robots building cars and stuff, and
we'll have computing power, but in turn and we'll have
a room up. But in terms of you know, mistaking
that for a human being, it seems at the very
least very far off.
Speaker 5: Well, it'll just have its cult members doing everything for it.
Speaker 2: I mean, self checkout doesn't work.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, I know, I wish this go ahead.
Speaker 2: It's just I think also that might be part.
Speaker 3: Of the psyop here, which is that the more you
put your faith into technology, the more at the moment
where you need it the most. The Internet crashes or
the self checkout doesn't work, you can't get your food.
You still got to wait for the boomer lady like
in charge of self checkout to come and swipe the
key so you can get your food.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I wish that explore a little bit more of
the doomsday cult that this film mentioned, But maybe they
didn't care about it because they had already had sort
of cult aspect with the Apostles in the previous installments
before seven or eight. But yeah, I think overall it
was an enjoyable series. Like you, I watched some of
the old ones maybe when I was a kid, and
I always liked Get Smart. You know, I grew up
watching Get Smart as a kid, so even the the
goofy comedic side of the spy world was something I
always enjoyed. And Mission Impossible, like he says, maybe more
relatable to Americans because it's you know, Ethan Hunt's an American,
and you get this US sort of propaganda element going
on in it.
Speaker 5: But I was wondering about what it's like for like
a Russian to watch an American movie or a Chinese
or something.
Speaker 1: Like I'm sure they see the propaganda in it, right?
Speaker 5: Why am I always the villain?
Speaker 1: Always the villain? Yeah? But anyway, Yeah, so I'm I
wonder if it really is the end of the series.
You know, these series tend to they like to milk
things and they like to do you know, spin offs,
they like to do you know, retro like origin stories.
So what's Ethan, you know Hunt's origin story. You know,
let's go back and do that. So yeah, we might
get spin offs. I don't know, but.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's the end of the series only
because Tom Cruise is the creative controller of the whole thing,
and I think that it's not something that is I mean,
it's like it's like you remember when he had that
Act of Congress where they took away the He and
Christopher Macquarie, his production partner, had that big thing where.
Speaker 2: It seemed very a very small thing.
Speaker 3: But when you used to watch TVs when they first
went digital, and they had to transfer from the screen
wide screen onto the TV, so you're watching the scene
and when the character walks over here, it moves, and
so there's a the film stock start still look fake,
like you're watching a home video. And Tom Cruise got
that pushed through and got it banned in Hollywood, so
that it keeps the integrity of the film stock. So
when you're moving the films the film, the way the
film looks is still the same.
Speaker 2: It's not just letterbox.
Speaker 3: But it's small things like that or at you know,
with the surround sound, the fault setting on the surround sound,
or when you're streaming. I think those are important things
that sort of convey the fact that he has could
creative control over this and it won't turn into just
another money grab because he has no reason for a
money Everything in his career kind of shows that he
has no reason for a money grab. All the things
that he does already they already sort of turned to
gold anyway, so he sort of seems to be sort
of above that.
Speaker 2: Maybe I don't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, what's your last thoughts on it? Jammy?
Speaker 5: It was pretty sentimental the last part two with all
the flashbacks and stuff.
Speaker 1: Another gum up Gucci suit eating you owe me a
Gucci suit?
Speaker 5: Eating Hello, less tears from our hero.
Speaker 1: He was crying a lot of I don't think he
cried in the other ones, did he until now? No,
So like he loses his wife, loses Kerrie Russell, but
he cries when he when he loses ving rings.
Speaker 2: Right, Well, we walked out thinking like, is is this
is this his epitaph? Like is something wrong with him?
He's going to go soon? I mean, because this.
Speaker 3: Was really like a final statement, I'm never making a
movie again.
Speaker 2: But it's just the final part of the series.
Speaker 3: Maybe this is because in his old age he's becoming
more oversentimental, you know, or with like in Top Gun,
having Val Kilmer in it, and it's sort of well,
we got to send off literally going to pass away,
so we're going to have him in the film passing away?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, is he okay?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, let's move on to The Surfer, which
we saw in Calabasas when we were on our podcast tour.
I really enjoyed it. It was not at all what
I expected. I'm glad that I didn't really I sort
of glanced at the trailer, I didn't pay attention to it.
So I was raw and fresh to this film, which
I think this film wants you to just be raw,
fresh and just mystified. It wants you to be thrown
for a loop, and that's exactly what happened, and I
thought it was amazingly executed. Every aspect of it was
was top notch, especially the cinematography, the storytelling, the acting
was phenomenal. Everything was top notch. The only thing I
didn't like was that it was a little too gross
for me personally. I understand that's sort of the you know,
the Southern Gothic. I guess you could say that's that
you can appreciate in the film. It's part of the story,
so I get it a little bit some of us
a little too gross for me. But before we get
into the story itself and the symbolism and all that,
my initial takeaway was that I was glad to be
mystified and thrown for a loop by a movie without
expecting it. What did you think?
Speaker 5: I still don't know what happened.
Speaker 1: I think we are supposed to have the vantage point
of a of a bomb having a fever dream of
his life, and then we don't really know what's real
and what wasn't. But that was what made it great.
Speaker 5: Go ahead, well, and you also feel like this happened
to you too?
Speaker 1: And was that real? R exactly? Yeah? What'd you think?
Speaker 3: BLA, Well, I thought that first of all, we went
to see it and we were the only people in
the theater, which was not which was not a shock,
but that was okay because oftentimes really good movies don't
get a viewing audience in cinema. And I really liked
and I appreciate that it was an agonal film with
a with an original story. It was something new, It
wasn't a prequel, it wasn't a sequel, and it was
it was actually very much like a play. A lot
of films being made right now are like plays that
are filmed. And it added enough sort of dazzled to
the movie to make it sort of unplayable in a theater,
which added a layer to it. There's a small cast
of characters, there's there's really not that much going on
in the film, but there's a lot going on in
one place.
Speaker 2: And it's basically a parking lot movie.
Speaker 3: The whole thing like takes place in a parking lot
with a beach down down the street. And it was
also both unrelatable and relatable. It was unrelatable because we're
not any of these characters. You know, we're not surfers,
we're you know, we're not Australian, we're not real estate people.
You know, we're not going to buy a mansion or
whatever overlooking the sea, you know. But it was relatable
because it it had aspects of it in terms of
the inner per personality and the way that the characters
work with each other that we sort of probably all go.
Speaker 2: Through at some point in your in our lives.
Speaker 3: You know, when a when a when a guy, especially
when we're younger and we meet a new group of people,
that could always be a thing where you're not in
it or you're in it. And so that was relatable
in a way. Now it got way way past that
because it became really a fraternity initiation going to the
absolute extreme, and it was you know, it resembled a
bunch of other movies. It resembled like a little bit
of Falling Down, you know with Michael Douglas, a little
bit of Point Break obviously because of the surfer aspects,
when when he first walks down to the beach, you know,
that's basically like the part and Point Break where he is,
you know, go back to the valley man, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah. In fact, we were making the joke that maybe
Nicholas Cage was actually body having survived the giant wave
at the end of you know, point break.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, he would be No, he would be Roach,
he would be but Body, I can't handle the cage man.
So Body definitely went. But maybe Roach survived his gunshot
from Gary Busey and you know, having a sun and
moving to Australia. I thought that the movie was interesting
because the photography of it was perfectly fit the I
was talking about form and content earlier, and the form
of the movie, the way that it looks, really conveyed
the content. So we have this and there was a
real you know juxtaposition. We have like a darkness happening
inside of characters, and it's soaked in sunlight. So it
shows you that this you know, initiation gaslighting manosphere, a
re Luciferian character doesn't always have to be in darkness.
It can be in blinding sunlight. And again, a lot
of it reminded me of weirdly of Narnia, just because
it deals with the archetypal themes here where you have
a character who is a real type of Satan care
who's offering things to you that will satiate your appetite,
but your appetite becomes an appetite for destruction, and you
can't actually find the things that are meaningful to you,
which our service, you know, and love for someone else,
and the characters become sort of wrapped up in themselves.
Speaker 2: But I really liked it. I thought it was an
interesting film.
Speaker 1: Now to get into the actual story and this is
just my first glance. Thought I could be wrong because
there were a lot of details, a lot of pieces
to the puzzle to try to keep up with, and
I like that puzzle element of it. We keep getting
clues as to what's actually going on, but we also
get misdirection that tells us maybe we don't know what's
going on. So we think that Initially we've got this wealthy, divorced,
separated Nick Cage character who's wanting to get this childhood
home that he had or grew up nearby or whatever
that he always liked. And he's not based in Australia,
but he was there when he was young, so he's
taking his son back there and he wants to impress
his son and show him that hey, this is where
I served, this is what you need to do, you know,
kind of wanting to lead his son into some form
of manhood to initiate his son into manhood, and his
son is not really interested in surfing as much as
Nick Cage's. They try to go to this beach and
it's very territorial. You're not welcome here, get out of here,
a foreigner, et cetera, and you can't reason with him.
We find out later it's almost kind of a cult.
It's a surf cult gang. And Nick Cage's son disappears
for the next several days, and as Nick Cage tries
to settle this deal in this house, he keeps getting
distracted and wrapped up in the drama of the parking
lot of the beach and the cult of surfers on
the beach, which is, like you said, some form of
corporate red pill manosphere retreat for elites, we think. But
we start getting clues that maybe Nick Cage isn't all there.
He increasingly does bizarre odd activities and behavior that suggests
perhaps he's just getting you know, heat, you know, sickness,
or some sort of you know, the sun's getting to him,
or is he actually dissociative, We don't exactly know. He
encounters a bomb, the bomb seems to act very odd,
and then we get other teenagers showing up that also
sort of taunts both the bomb and Nick Cage. Things
get worse and worse and worse. It starts to turn
into It kind of reminded me, and it is kind
of a dark comedy as well. The Martin Scorsese film
from the eighties, the comedy where it just gets it's
that one Guy's really the comedy No, No, No, that the
characters having like the worst night ever, and it just
gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. Yeah,
it's a really good dark satire from Scorsese, which he
doesn't do many of.
Speaker 2: But something time, not the one with Rupert Pupkin. It's
the other one. I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: It's escaping mean but anyway, it's reminiscent of that because
it just gets worse and worse and worse, and they
keep pushing Nick Cage. You think he's gonna snap, You're
gonna get pure crage, but you don't get it as
soon as you think. I know, I'm rambling, but so
that this is kind of giving the basics of the story,
and then we get the idea that no, actually this
is all an initiation for Nick Cage to be let
into this elite retreat, and he doesn't remember signing up
for it because he's so exhausted, and you know, after hours,
that's it after our so it's a lot like after hours,
and he's basically dissociating, perhaps because of the heat and
the exhaustion and the lack of water and food, but
we don't know. But my thesis was that Nick Cage
is the bum. The bum is the real character. And
you see this when he flashes into the mirror in
the bathroom when he looks in the rearview mirror of
the Bum's car, and it's almost like the life that
the bumb would have had had the bum's son lived.
He did not live. And there's other things that happened
that let us know that the sun isn't real. The
sun is never there for the majority of this, even
though they're supposed to be there to get this house,
and the sun just appears out of nowhere towards the
third act, riding his bicycle, so that lets us, i think,
know that this is not a real son. And we
see the newspaper clipping of the son who had died.
We know that the bum blames the lead surfer guy
for killing his dog. So there's all these indicators that
the whole phenomena is the bomb eventually snapping, and that
Nick Cage, as the realtor, is the life that the
bomb believed that he should have is a sort of
a dissociative thing, and he was willing to die at
the end because he had lost his son. I mean,
that's kind of my thought that I could be wrong
about that.
Speaker 2: I thought it was.
Speaker 3: It reminded me a lot of that movie The Game
with Michael Douglas, and yeah, that's a great one because
he's put through almost the exact same type of situation
where everybody around him puts him into this alternate reality
and he starts to question his own sanity. And remember
that the driving force for that movie was that Michael
Douglas's character is a successful corporate guy with this kind
of you know, dualistic brother played by Sean Penn, who
is free to do anything he wants and it's part
of a secret society that's going to teach him what
it means to be human again. And it's all driven
by the fact that his father had been unalived himself
in front of him at the estate, and so the
rest of the movie is it sort of centers on
whether he is his own father, whether he's becoming his
own father. And I think this film kind of I
went through a similar thing, because I mean when he
starts to go into the bathroom and like, you know,
somebody puts a gun up on the thing, and then
he goes and finds it, and you know, he goes
all the way down to the depths and he's like
drinking out of puddles and he's eating rats and all
this stuff. And then he's living in the subaru, and
I started to think, you know, is he the bum?
But then I thought, is he both the bum? And
he is himself? So he sees the so I think
he is himself, but to others he is a type
of bum character. And that's sort of what they're They're
trying to create this sort of insular society where they
keep the riff rap out, and to them, he it's
it's worth it to sort of push this thing where
he doubts his own sanity. He becomes that because he
may not be that on the outside, but on the
inside he's certainly that. With his son disappearing when they
first get there and he walks down with his son.
You know, the first confrontation he has with the main guy, Scaley,
he's a Scaley wag is he says to him, you
know what, look my you know woman, to bust your
chops in front of your son or whatever. And because
it's an ultimately, you know, a demeaning thing, and his
son is already embarrassed to go with him. But when
his son disappears, that sort of said to me that
his family has abandoned him. And he's also abandoned his
family in the in the same way that his father
abandoned him at the beginning. So is he repeating the
cycle that his father did when he sees this flash
at the end of the film where he sees his
father sort of on the beach dead. But is this
a redemption cycle where he is because regardless of anything
that happens, the film does end with him being initiated
but then giving you know, he doesn't unlike the other
guys who are just again trying to feed their appetite
or who are ultimately self serving, he doesn't do that.
At the end of the film, he offers to take
the place of his son, and he's found himself now
that he is, you know, like like Edmund in the
line of the Witch of the orderbe that uncovering. There's
not a time his whole life before this where he
hasn't been totally self serving. Now he's finally thought of
someone else beside him, besides himself, and that seems to
save him at the end of the movie. But regardless
of that, that doesn't disqualify the fact that for most
of the film, I mean, he essentially is the If
he isn't the bum already, he becomes it, Yeah, I
mean it.
Speaker 1: I saw it as a revenge story, as a redemption story,
because definitely at the end, I think we see, you know,
the real estate character Nick Cage getting away with his son,
and that's whatever was real or not real with the
bomb who lost his son, that's what he envisioned was
I want my life with my son where I get
to surf with him, and that was all taken from me. Yea,
And either way it is that it's a kind of
a revenge redemption story. And I like that we were
just sort of led through this this mental maze, you know,
of hysteria and dementia to that endpoint of redemption at
the end with the character. I haven't seen a movie
like that in a long time, and I think you're
right to liking it.
Speaker 3: To the game, Yeah, it has elements of like of
Masons or you know, remember the Stone the what are
they the Stone Masons and the Simpsons, where like the
Cops are the Masons. Right, everybody is part of the thing,
and it's very seductive in the movie because at times,
you know, I don't know if you guys felt this,
but watching the movie, I kind of felt like, oh,
you know, maybe these guys aren't so bad at times.
I mean, they've got a group of it's a group
of buds. They're they're surfing, they got their little shack.
It's cool, they're doing what they want to do. And
then there's a scene where they're they're they're all dressed
nice and they have their families and they're like, this
is a part of our thing. But then it goes
wrong when when he gets down there and talks to
them and he figures out that the guy made the
girl have the abration. They eliminated one of the other
guys in the group. They're clearly doing very like Skittle
stuff when they're together doing this sort of like remember
remember the ad a few years ago where like the
women went into the woods and they were like they
had the sticks and they were like hitting the sticks
on the ground and screaming, and they were trying to
like interface with their primal womanhood.
Speaker 2: It was like that but for dudes, and it was
very weird. Also, what's the deal with like the red
cape dress thing that they were that the guy was wearing.
It was clearly Satan.
Speaker 3: I mean he's clearly Yeah, this guy shows up in
a red robe. He clearly Satan.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Well, when there's the flashback scene, is it not that
main guy? Is he not there amongst the crowd as well?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess he's. I guess he's always been there.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying, Like I think he was, which
is telling us, like, you know, he's an archetypal character.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I think that these sort of things are seductive
for people in the sense that when you look at
any authoritarian or any you know, look at the twentieth
century and look at authoritarian movements, one thing that they
do come down to is the fact that they sell
themselves on the fact that They want to make life
safe and peaceful for their people. So they want to
make it so that people can go to the store
and not get assaulted. They don't get bums, you know,
hobo demons trying to sell them stuff or ask them
questions everywhere they go. They want things clean. They don't
want trash sitting all around. So that's very seductive, but
it depends on what the motivation is and what you
what you're willing to do for that, and whether it.
Speaker 1: Is you know, to.
Speaker 3: Ultimately, I guess, to serve Christ, or whether this is
to serve yourself. Uh, and to have this thing where
you steal this poor guy's surfboard and you're sitting down
there like, you know, what is it, surfer?
Speaker 2: What does it? Jamie suffer? Surfer surfer?
Speaker 5: Surfer surfer is suffer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yes, it's like Body's cult turned dark. Right, Body
had a cult.
Speaker 3: Too, and it was like that well Body, Body had
that whole speech about these people don't understand man driving
around in their metal coffins.
Speaker 2: They'll never be in touch that they're true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great lie. And uh, I'm pretty sure too.
You mentions the Federal Reserve too when they're in the van.
Doesn't body mentioned like they're all being lied to and
you know they're under the tyranny of the Fella Reserve
and blah blah blah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, he's the spiritual leader.
Speaker 3: He's the you know, who's that? She says, who's that?
That's body, the bodhisatva. He's a real searcher. What's he
searching for? The ride the Ultimately, he's a spiritual leader
for them who in the end wants to converge with
the fifty year storm, you know, because he can't have
a lot cage and they're willing to do anything to
come to to finance the ulti you know, the Endless Summer.
Speaker 1: Like extreme adrenaline ross right.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because Gary Busey in that film was in
the Earth what's the Early It wasn't Endless Summer, but
Gary Busey was in the other surfer movie that that
movie is taken from when he was in the sixties.
But yeah, it's another thing where you know, you it's
a it's you get a character Johnny Utah who is
who comes from a normal place initiates himself into by
the way his first job.
Speaker 2: It's always the first job. It's like Clarice, or it's
like Long Last.
Speaker 3: It's the woman's it's the woman's first day on the
job and she, you know, finds the serial. Yeah, but uh,
I thought this one was good and it I'm always
stempted to think of something like Mandy with this because
whenever Nicholas Cage has a sort of freak out, you know,
and an alternate reality and goes on a I mean
you have to say, I mean, he did defend himself
in the movie. He wasn't a simp in the movie
and sort of just taking whatever beating they gave him.
He did defend himself. He punched that guy when he
went down to the beach, and you know, but all
the little things in the movie I thought were really great,
like this the watch, you know, just give me a
drink and the guy's like, well, I need your watch,
and so now he has. It's this little thing that
he's tied to. But then everyone else and then the
people in line behind him are like, I'll pay for it,
don't worry about it, I got it. And then so
now that's how everyone in the play season.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I thought it was pretty well done.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree, I loved it. I want to rewatch
it and kind of pay it to the clues and
see where it goes. But thank you for coming on BLA.
It was a great discussion. I'll upload this and tell
everybody remind you guys, be sure and follow baselet Analyzer
at his channel. I got him linked in the show description,
so check him out. He's got a ton of great
analyzes over there, from everything from the Road to Shakespeare
to Narnia, which is awesome. I've been wanting to do
Narnia two for a long time, so very cool that
you're getting to it. I'll have to check those out
and then be sure and follow Jamie over at her
channel as well as she does some breakdowns and finishes
her book. And Essa de Cali with three will be
out soon. Anything you want to leave us with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks, thanks for having me. Guys really appreciate it. Yeah,
everybody go to my channel, baselet Analyzer. I'm doing a
multi part series on Narnia right now, all seven of
the Narnia books plus the biographies of C. S.
Speaker 2: Lewis.
Speaker 3: Then I'm going to do the Space trilogy until we
have faces, so a lot of CS Lewis so come.
Speaker 2: On over for a lot of literary and filming.
Speaker 1: Alsis all right, Thank you guy so much. Everybody, have
a good night.