John Dies At The End

I like trippy films. A few of my favorites would be 2001: A Space Odyssey and Cube^2: Hypercube. John Dies At The End is now added to my list of interesting films, and I shall tell you why. 

This is what it feels like to watch trippy movies.

     It's sort of a comic horror movie that's actually deeper than it seems, though it is a bit more than slightly crude. Some kids take a street drug called soy sauce (an actual drug btw), but this drug is alive and allows the kids a moment of clairvoyance and insight into the spirit world, and when it deems the kid useless, it kills them because the sauce has an ulterior motive. The story follows a guy named Dave and his friend John as they first experience it, but the actual movie begins with Dave explaining to a reporter about how it all happened, and the events that unfolded upon taking the soy sauce. Turns out there was an evil being in an alternate dimension called Korrok that the soy sauce has been trying to destroy, and Dave and John travel to the other dimension to defeat him. 

     Though a somewhat stupid and a less than tasteful film, some concepts came up that really boggled my mind, and the more and more I thought about it, the more and more confused I got. For example, Dave mentioned how things and our future was already predestined upon taking the soy sauce and getting psychic powers. 

     I went to Georgia for the weekend and flew back up, and while I was staring at the shapes the clouds made from the plane, I couldn't help but wonder whether we see shapes in the clouds because of our imagination, or if God made the cloud that shape BECAUSE He knew we would see a shape out of it. Perhaps everything is already predestined and we really don't have control over our lives because God knew it would happen and made it so from the beginning of time, and that our free will doesn't mean what we think it is. Maybe free will involves the decision of whether or not we can purely and sincerely love Him instead of being free to do whatever we please, because things happen to us for a reason and God made it so.

     I wouldn't recommend watching this on campus, but hey, we're DMA majors and can probably get away with it anyways (just use headphones). I definitely think it's worth a watch, especially if you can get past the crudeness. Perhaps I'm digging deeper into it than the movie intended, but that's what I got out of it. 

P.S. AND SPOILER ALERT: John doesn't die at the end. He dies at the beginning, and then it just so happens that he didn't die after all, and it made me kind of upset because what the heck you guys way to make a misleading movie title.