Jacob's Ladder
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Movie Reviews of Jacob's Ladder
Movie Review: Don't buy this one.
Summary: 5 Stars
Wait for them to include the extra scenes back into the movie. I saw it with those in it and that made the film a whole lot scarier. It also helped film, because in parts, it does drag a bit. This is a terrifying yet funny horror movie. This movie left me reeling with turmoil and confusion, with feelings of sadness and despair. Those are the notes it strives for. "Jacob's Ladder" enters into the hallucinations of a desperate mind, and lives there. It evokes a paranoid-schizophrenic state as effectively as any film I have ever seen. Despite an ending that is intended as victorious, the movie is a thoroughly painful and depressing experience - but, it must be said, one that has been powerfully written, directed and acted. The story stars Tim Robbins, previously the pleasant young hero of such films as "Bull Durham," as an American soldier in Vietnam who undergoes a shocking battle experience. The actual nature of the experience is withheld until the end of the film - and even then, we cannot be completely sure we know the truth - but it appears to send him back into civilian life as a psychological time bomb. Years pass. He gains a doctoral degree, but does not use it. Instead, after a first marriage fails and a young son is killed in an accident, he goes to work for the U.S. Postal Service, and starts to live with a woman he meets there. Then terrible things begin to happen to him. He is nearly run down by a subway train. Almost run over in the streets. Faceless demons pursue him. His doctor is killed in an automobile explosion. This movie left me reeling with turmoil and confusion, with feelings of sadness and despair. Those are the notes it strives for. "Jacob's Ladder" enters into the hallucinations of a desperate mind, and lives there. It evokes a paranoid-schizophrenic state as effectively as any film I have ever seen. Despite an ending that is intended as victorious, the movie is a thoroughly painful and depressing experience - but, it must be said, one that has been powerfully written, directed and acted. The story stars Tim Robbins, previously the pleasant young hero of such films as "Bull Durham," as an American soldier in Vietnam who undergoes a shocking battle experience. The actual nature of the experience is withheld until the end of the film - and even then, we cannot be completely sure we know the truth - but it appears to send him back into civilian life as a psychological time bomb. Years pass. He gains a doctoral degree, but does not use it. Instead, after a first marriage fails and a young son is killed in an accident, he goes to work for the U.S. Postal Service, and starts to live with a woman he meets there. Then terrible things begin to happen to him. He is nearly run down by a subway train. Almost run over in the streets. Faceless demons pursue him. His doctor is killed in an automobile explosion. So is a friend. He begins to suspect that he and his Vietnam friends were victims of some kind of misbegotten Army experiment. That day of their bloody battlefield experience, they all grew dizzy and their heads began to spin, and then he cannot remember what happened next. He was wounded, yes, and airlifted to a hospital - and what then? Flashbacks throughout the film follow his emergency treatment. But what is the secret of what happened? He gathers a group of fellow veterans, and they talk to a lawyer about representing them, but then the veterans and the lawyer back out. You will leave scared, disturbed, and a very unpleasant feeling with you. Stupid movie goers shouldn't see this. That's right this movie requires the audiences participation, and that takes to much effort for you MTV kids out there who think everything that makes a good movie is CGI, potty humor, and sex.Movie Review: A Profound and Riveting Film
Summary: 5 Stars
Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) is an American soldier serving in Vietnam in the late 60's. He and his comrades are relaxing in a clearing in the bush when they suddenly begin to feel terribly ill, some of them vomiting and undergoing frightening convulsions. There's a report of movement in the bush, gunfire erupts, mortar shells explode all around, and the soldiers respond with frenzied violence culminating in Singer being bayoneted in the stomach by an unseen enemy and later taken aboard a helicopter for medical evacuation.
In the next scene, Singer awakens from a nap on a deserted New York City subway car hurtling along the tracks. He doesn't know if he's passed his stop. He walks into the next car and asks a woman where they are. She just stares at him creepily. As the subway comes to a stop, he looks down and sees a disheveled figure lying across some seats by the exit, and there appears to be a squirming, snakelike creature protruding from his body. Singer hastily exits the subway car to find himself locked underground with no one else around. There appears to be an unlocked exit on the other side of the tracks, but as he makes his way across the tracks, he has to dodge a train that comes racing out of nowhere, and as the train flies away from him, he sees grotesque faces staring out at him from the windows.
Singer goes home to his girlfriend Jezebel (Elizabeth Pena) and tries to carry on his life as usual. He's an underachieving postal worker with a PhD living in a grimy New York apartment. But he's plagued by more and more demon-like figures and frightening experiences and learns that others who served with him in Vietnam and were with him on that fateful day in the bush are having similar experiences and dying one-by-one in mysterious ways. He goes to sleep and wakes up to find himself in bed with his former wife (Patricia Kalember) in their old apartment, and one of his young sons (Macaulay Culkin), who was fatally injured by a car years ago, walks into the room complaining that he can't sleep. Jacob tucks him into bed, bids goodnight to his other two children, and the next thing he knows, he's back with Jezebel. He becomes increasingly disoriented and frightened by his nightmarish experiences and desperately seeks answers to what's happening to him. A former Army chemist seems to have part of the answer, but his chiropractor friend Louis (Danny Aiello) may have a much bigger part of it when he quotes the great Christian mystic Meister Eckhart: "The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away, but they're not punishing you, they're freeing your soul."
Jacob's Ladder was released in 1990. Its director was Adrian Lyne, who adapted it from a screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin. A number of prominent reviewers panned the film as a pretentious exercise in heavy-handed symbolism and incoherent obscurity, but I don't understand how they could have been addressing the same film I saw. I found Jacob's Ladder to be a remarkable meditation on life and death and an extraordinarily compelling piece of filmmaking. If I had a top ten list of my all-time favorite films, Jacob's Ladder would definitely be on it. I give it an exceedingly rare A+
I strongly recommend that you get the "Special Edition" version with a "Special Features" documentary on the making and meaning of the film. It features illuminating commentary by director Adrian Lyne and screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin.
Movie Review: YOU MIGHT ACTUALLY BE DEAD AND ONLY THINK YOU'RE ALIVE AND SCIENCE, NOT MAGIC, BACKS THIS IDEA UP.
Summary: 5 Stars
this movie scared me so bad i couldn't sleep afterwards very well for a few nights! i never want to see it again, it is that scary! this guy can't get out of a purgatorial loop of three different lives; living with his girlfriend and everything's fine, being in vietnam, being in what seems to be hell as a nightmare mental hospital, and spending time with his son who had already passed on. he can't get out and he is confused and tortured by what is happening to him.
it's even worse for someone like me who has studied the subject matter the movie is based on which is in part science which i explain in the next paragraph and part the tibetan book of the dead. it's a book written almost a thousand years ago that is supposed to teach a person how to get through a dream/nightmare world that it says we all experience after death before we are reborn again. since this is a dream state and most of us never know if we are dreaming or not until we wake up from a dream, that means that this reality itself could be a dream. or if you don't like mystical stuff like that try this on for size: after the body dies the brain stays alive for six to twelve minutes.
if this brain activity is anything like a dream your brain could create a dream that seems like you are alive and, as we all know, time seems to go on for much much longer in a dream than in real life. you can wake up, look at your clock and see that it's five o' seven, fall asleep have a dream that seems to last a half hour or more and wake up and see that it's only five o' eight. dream researchers also note that most people have dreams that seem to last for more than a day and some for more than weeks or years. they don't really last this long, the brain basically sets up a scenario for the dreamer to play out and the dreamer just assumes time has passed and the brain inserts the proper memories into the dream so the dreamer can remember what has happened in the time that has passed. this is similar to when you dream you're a firefighter or a superhero, you have the memory that this is who you are because your brain set up the scenario for you to play out only instead of just who you are your brain sets up what you were doing for the past hours/days/weeks. a dream can last a maximum of one hour but that doesn't stop people from waking up from a dream that seemed to span two days/weeks/years. that being said, if our brain can trick us into thinking great amounts of time have passed while linking these moments together with real or fictionalized moments then it could easily link together twelve minutes of dream time with key moments of our lives while filling in the spots between with our memories or fictionalized experiences. you could just think this is real when really this "life" you are living is a world created by your brain. this means that right now you could in fact be lying on an operating table somewhere after a failed surgery, you could be dead.
that is why this movie scares the poo out of me and i never want to see it again.
Movie Review: Disturbing, chilling take on the illusion of reality
Summary: 5 Stars
Taking as its theme the more or less accepted theory that the US government experimented with hallucinogenic substances on its troops during the Vietnam war in an effort to "improve" their performance, Jacob's Ladder is a film of contradictions and surprises which succeeds, like hallucinogens, in disorienting, confusing and frightening the viewer. Tim Robbins is superbly understated as the gentle protagonist Jacob Singer, ripped from the bosom of his family and planted in the hell that was Vietnam. After his return from Vietnam, Jacob is plagued by distressing hallucinations, portentous dreams and encounters with mysterious men which invariably end in violence. The narrative constantly shifts between the "present", Vietnam and Jacob's life before Vietnam, and has the effect of destabilising the logic of the film so that ambiguity creeps into all aspects and a menacing air of uncertainty pervades the action - is Jacob hallucinating or really seeing monsters? What exactly happened to him in Vietnam? Are his memories accurate or have they been distorted by his experiences?
Adrian Lynes' meditation on the nature of the past contains echoes of Proust - memories are all we have, but can they ever faithfully reflect what happened, or are they inevitably coloured by the events that succeed them? The fact that the director is English is, I think, an important point. As an outsider he brings a different perspective to Vietnam (similar to Alan Parker's excellent Birdie) that is more circumspect than the views of, say, Oliver Stone or Francis Coppola.
The film's ending is shocking, but I would argue that it is rather more ambiguous than most reviewers assume. If you read it one way then yes, it does undermine the rest of the film. But I don't think Lyne intended it literally: if you accept that what happens is symbolic, then it makes a lot more sense, and can be taken to mean several things, none of which subverts the film's message: that unspeakable things happened in Vietnam that its survivors will go to any lengths to try to forget, and that the US government acted with astonishing dishonesty, hypocrisy and evil intent in what it did, not just to the Vietcong, but to its own troops. Jacob's Ladder is as powerful a film in its own way as Apocalypse Now was, though maybe its resonance was not as powerful at the time of its release. From a distance of a decade or more, however, the film has not diminished in any way and stands as a powerful testament to the way in which that terrible conflict burned into America's collective psyche and altered its view of itself irrevocably.
Movie Review: Most reviews are of Jacob's Ladder are wrong.
Summary: 5 Stars
No other film has been so misunderstood.
Jacob's Ladder is a film about the pain and fear felt by a man coming to terms with his imminent death. In the movie Jacob is stabbed with a bayonette and lie dying in the jungle. That's real. While laying there he struggled to live and that struggle manifested itself in the chaos that went through his mind. The real success of the film is that we the audience participate in his death and the terror of his dying through the flashback sequences with Jezebel, the chiropractor, Sarah and Gabriel. When Jacob fought his death he was always in distress and always with Jezebel. She was a literary construct to torment him. When he would accept his death he was always happy, with the ones he loved such as the chiropractor, his wife Sarah, and of course his son Gabriel. The movie goes back and forth with his struggle to live or die. What makes it so successful is how the film imparts the terror and pain of a dying man onto the viewer. That's what did it for me. No other film in cinematic history has accomplished this task. Although Jacob's death took place in Vietnam the movie is NOT about Vietnam, hallucinogenic drugs, demons or psychotic ex-girlfriends.
The character in the movie that explains the movie's plot - and literary mechanisms - is Danny Aiello's character the chiropractor. The chiropractor explains so eloquently that "if you fight your death you'll see demons tearing away at your life. But if you accept your death, the devils are really angels setting you free." Dante. The flashbacks in the movie are deliberately misleading deliberately terrifying. Jacob kept flashing back and forth between Jezebel and Sarah. Live or die. Jezebel was the dark manifestation of his fear tearing him away from the life he loved with Sarah. The metaphor of "The Ladder" is Jacob's ascension to heaven where he is met at the gate by Gabriel his deceased son.
It's one of the most beautifully written screenplays of all time but for obvious reasons difficult to follow because of the chaos created by the flashbacks. What you have to understand is that in all likely hood Elizabeth Penas character never existed because he never made it back to New York. He had no life after Vietnam because he died in Vietnam. Jacob died on the table in Vietnam with a smile on his face after finally accepting and making peace with his life. What do the doctors say in the very last scene of the movie? "Put up a hell of a fight. The guy looks kinda peaceful." I hope this helps your understanding of the film. I cherish it.