Ruminations on a #$!@&%* Movie: A Snakes on a Plane Review

Snakes on an Introduction: I wish this article could be short and sweet. Condensed and poetically perfect—just like the high-concept title of this film. Snakes on a Plane: as Josh Friedman put it, “the Everlasting Gobstopper of movie titles.� Who’s Josh Friedman you ask? He’s the screenwriter who wrote a brilliant blog entry and inadvertently created the pop-culture groundswell that put this movie on the map, spawned a hyper-creative community of SoaP fans (even before the movie released), and made “Snakes on a Plane,� as a concept, an idea, into the latest and hippest Zen koan around.

Snakes on a Side-note: By the way, if you didn’t realize that Snakes was a pop-culture phenomenon, I’d suggest checking out the blog entry in question, and also two other sites (of many) that have become part of this whole thing: snakesonablog and blanksonablank. So, check those, get acclimated, and then we’ll be ready to get back to my not-nearly-as-concise-as-the-title-of-SoaP article, wherein we’ll presently open some windows on . . .

Snakes on a Mini-Review: Alright fanboys, here’s the truth: Snakes as a movie, without the accoutrements, wasn’t that good. It felt pieced together—probably due to the numerous pickups done to achieve an R rating. Consequently, the tone was uneven. It was supposed to be funny in places, but felt needlessly violent in others. Jackson’s famed line about those mother-blanking snakes on the mother-blanking plane is gold, truly, but doesn’t match the feelings evoked by young children in peril, innocent honeymooners meaninglessly developed and then killed, pseudo-love-stories.

This doesn’t mean that I didn’t, on the whole, like the movie. I did, in a way. I mean, Sam Jackson could read insurance convention literature and make it interesting, and the story was workable, of course. There were, after all, snakes on a plane. But the problem is that, with the expectations that fans had, SoaP took itself too seriously—likely a hangover from before the Internet buzz, before the pickups. What was needed, I think, was Evil Dead. You know, on-purpose kitsch. B-movie status all the way. One-liners every five minutes. Cardboard-cutout characters. Obviously self-conscious stereotyping. Not even a hint that you should actually, as a viewer, take it seriously or become invested.

Snakes on a Transition: But this is where the fascinating thing happens—the thing that makes Snakes on a Plane worth watching and talking about. I was slightly disappointed with the movie because I was caught up in the expectations. I knew what I wanted, what everyone wanted, and it didn’t really happen. The movie wasn’t bad-good, it was just "eh" and I was upset. But what do these collective expectations say about me and us? What does it say that a large number of people made Snakes into a phenomenon, months before release, and surrounded it with such an artifice of shoulds and coulds, hopes and anticipations? I think it says several things . . .

Snakes on a Discussion of This Movie’s Function as Culture-Window: First, it has to be said that Snakes became what it was, mainly, because of the title. As Friedman puts it, “It’s a title. It’s a concept. It’s a poster and a logline and whatever else you need it to be. It’s perfect.� Exactly. The high-concept, super-simple title started it all. Why? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s the total lack of euphemism and politicking. There are snakes. On a plane. That’s it. No explication needed. No hiding. No misdirection. Just the snakes and the plane. Whatever the case—whatever this en masse embracing of concision says about modern moviegoers—SoaP tapped into something with its moniker, and to great effects.

Second, the Samuel L. Jackson factor has to be taken into account. He helped make the movie what it became, and played a large part in the specific expectations that people had, because he is an icon in the purest sense of the word. However he did it, Sam Jackson has become the icon, the epitome of cool. We all know what it says on his wallet. No one else has a purple light saber. I mean, he’s Shaft, for crying out loud. And it is this icon that we wanted to see pitted against those snakes. “Who’s cooler?� became the implied question. Snakes are quiet and deadly and cold-blooded and heartless and they look cool being that way. Oh, but Sam is all those things too, and he’s on our side. Go Sam!

Unfortunately, Snakes let its audience down on this point. The expectations were there—the icon was ready to be painted and worshipped—but this film was far from Pulp Fiction. Jackson isn’t even in the movie as much as it feels like he should be, and when he is, there’s just something . . . missing. The reality just couldn’t, in this case, meet up with the glowing fantasy of our King of Cool going head-to-head with King Cobra. All I was left with, obviously (and gladly, compared to the movie), was a chance to consider Jackson’s status as an icon, and why we create such icons, why we need them, what it says about us.

Finally, there’s something deep going on with this movie—and all movies that are, or that we want to be, bad-good—that has to do with value assignment. I can’t tell if movies like this, or like Evil Dead, or whatever, sprout up legions of fanboys because of some bandwagon factor, or because of some desire to be seen as unique, or because of something that’s gained from just the act of value assigning, perhaps a feeling of ownership or participation in something bigger than oneself, or what.

If SoaP had done what it should’ve done and veered straight into a sort-of action movie satire, then you could legitimately give it aesthetic credence. But it didn’t. Nevertheless, the fanboys will remain fanboys. In fact, they may become more rabid. They may slay you on forums. You probably just don’t get it, can’t get it, they’ll say. It becomes a club, a cult of those in the know who are able to see the true value of the movie, the TV show, the comic, the whatever. And why does this happen? How could it have happened with Snakes on a Plane even before it released? Dunno. But I know it says something about us.

Snakes on a Fleeting Spiritual Connection and a Conclusion: And does what it says about us have some spiritual relevance? Probably. It’s probably relevant that a large group of people (including me) long for simplicity, for icons, for a sense that what we value counts beyond just ourselves. It’d also probably be pretty easy to seat those longings someplace spiritual. So, is the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon, then, transcendent? Does it make sense that people use the words as a koan? Again, probably. All I know is: this is one case among many where the movie is less important, less interesting as a movie, than as a window into the culture and people that created it. On a plane. And I, for one, am glad to have been along for the ride.

Existentialism and the Vine: The Ruins Book Review

There’s something about the Kafkaesque. That bizarre, unescapable situation. Its being thrust forth, with no explanation, yet with a sense of destiny. Control. The resulting struggle, questionings, perhaps hope, perhaps angst/ennui, perhaps good ending, perhaps not—the inevitable character revelation and development that comes from being surrounded by the psychodramatic mirror of the Kafkaesque scenario. Sartre’s No Exit epitomizes it, along with Kafka’s works. Lost has it to popular appeal. Natali’s Cube has it in spades. And Scott Smith’s The Ruins has it. It’s dark, matter-of-fact, insightful, exciting, and thematically deep. And (necessary cliché alert): I couldn’t put it down.

The story is simple, though hard to fully explain without spoiling things. The book’s four main characters are on vacation in Mexico. They party, they meet new people, they be their innocuous selves. Quickly, however, a German fellow tourist they befriend invites them to come along on a day trip to find his brother. The brother, it seems, had met a girl, and returned with her to the titular ruins, where she was working as an archaeologist. The four hem and haw, their characters beginning to emerge in response to this new prospect, but end up going.

Once at the ruins, for reasons I won’t divulge, the four—plus the German, plus another fellow tourist, a Greek—are unable to leave. The ruins, in fact, place them all in great danger, and the remainder of the book is spent describing their navigation of this danger. Life or death, that’s the question. Suffice to say: the ruins are a scary place, and a place where that Kafkaesque scenario really begins to underline the book’s two strong suits: exciting, horrific, mysterious, page-turning plotting, and adept character development.

Not much more can be said about the former without spoiling things, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find that The Ruins is already optioned to be made into a film—and it’ll hopefully be a good one. If the pacing, symbolism, and foreshadowing is preserved, and the gravitas respected (Ben Stiller’s production company holds the rights), it should make a great horror/thriller movie for some summertime release . . . though I bet they’ll change the ending, at least a little.

The latter, however, is even more key, and it’s also what brings out the thematic elements of the story. The six characters who end up on the hillside of the ruins all become more distinct and complex in the midst of their crisis. And they also all begin to conform to types—yet in a good, insightful, easy-to-identify-with sort of way. Who becomes the leader? The one who knows how to ration food and store water and care for wounds? Jeff the Eagle Scout, of course. Do we need a vamp? Does sex come into this picture? Absolutely. Hence Stacy. Comic relief? Check. Eric. What about the strong, silent, mysterious type? The guy who got them into this in the first place? Mathias, the German who lost his brother.

All of the six, in some way, fulfill and question these kinds of classic story roles, even to the point of a very meta and funny conversation between the characters about who will play who when they escape the ruins and a movie version is made of their story (apparently Adam Sandler, Bruce Willis, and Madonna should be expecting calls). But there’s more to it than just how Smith uses these archetypes to flesh the characters out. It’s how language barriers come into play to make us think about communication itself. How what we say in secret sounds when it’s shouted aloud. How our past dictates what people think of us in the present. How being in extremis brings out who we really are, especially in relation to others. And, like all stories of this kind, it’s how easily the reader slips into the shoes of first one, then another of the characters, until we see ourselves, a bit, in all of them.

Thematically, seeing ourselves in the characters is paramount, especially in extremis. This is where The Ruins can become a metaphor—as is so easily done with these Kafkaesque stories—for life and how we react to it. Some characters remain hopeful, vigilant, productive. Would we? Some go mad. Would we? Some give up? Is that me? You? In the end, though, in this particular version of the metaphor, it doesn’t matter how we react to the scenario. Smith gives the impression that the characters, we, are doomed to the outcome—good or bad, I won’t say. He even goes so far as to make these characters’ plight on the ruins circular: it’s happened to others before, it happens to them, it will happen to others in the future. Just like life.

And while there is something to be said for this stoic perspective—even a place for it to be parsed Christianly in an appropriate way—Smith’s take on it is dark, and hopeless, and as embracing of what he perhaps sees as the angst of the real world, as his characters are at times of the angst of their fictional situation. One character even decides, at the end, that she doesn’t, after all, in face of the direness of it all, believe in God . . . a final rejection of hope or meaning in the midst of something that screams for it, amidst their screams.

So is The Ruins finally some big allegory about the meaningless, cyclical, Darwinian nature of life? Are we “the ruins�? Is the world “the ruins�? Are our attempts at meaning “the ruins�? Perhaps we’re meant just to understand: “get through whatever you have to get through, dealing with the other people you happen to be in it with, hoping that hell is not ‘other people,’ and knowing that it’ll end soon.� Or, perhaps, this is only one side of the story. Perhaps Smith would agree with this basic existentialism, yet unlike his character at the end, say that God may yet offer a toe-hold. Perhaps he’d say that life is absurd, meaningless, non-communicative, cyclical, etc., but that God can change all of that—like Kierkegaard, let us not forget, the “father of existentialism.�

Or, maybe that’s just what I’d like him to think, how I’d like to read it, being generally of a Kierkegaardian bent myself. Or maybe, it’s just a good book and doesn’t need to be torn all apart to be enjoyed. In fact, finally, this is for sure the case: regardless of how you interpret the tone, the ending, the characters, and all of that, The Ruins was the most fun I’ve had reading a book in a long time. Definitely a page-turner, definitely worthwhile, and definitely inviting of deeper looks. I give it three Fs for Freaky Flowering Flora, and a high recommendation.