No Country For Old Men

July 4th, 2009

(Spoilers ahead)

This is a good movie. Really.

The basic plot – guy finds drug money, runs with it and other guys start chasing him – is not exactly what you might call ‘original’. However, what makes the film original in my opinion are the characters. They do not react to the events like you would expect them to react. And because of this you look at things differently yourself.

What was very interesting for me was the theme of the fragility of human life. Throughout the film Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) goes around killing people. We see so many deaths without seeing the people’s lives. Only a couple of people give us hints about how they have lived, but what we remember about them is the  bolt gun in Anton’s hand that blew their brains out. Anonymous people are presented to us so that we can simply see them die.

And then there’s Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), the guy you like the most. He’s a good guy. You get to know him and hope he succeeds. And then he dies. And we don’t even see the actual event. We don’t see his heroic death. We get to see it after the fact. When he is already dead. Along with the rest of the anonymous corpses.

The main killer, Anton Chigurh, is basically the Grim Reaper. Totally anonymous, totally inescapable. No explanations.

So that was what made an impression on me.

Entry Filed under: TV/Film