A few days ago I rewatched “Bullet Train” on cable TV (my original review is posted here) and there was one scene that references something which seems to be part of the storyline in a few other movies recently. Something (some movies call it “fate”) or someone has affected everything in a person life so that the person eventually gets to a certain scenario. It’s part of the storyline for “Bullet Train”, part of the storyline for the James Bond movie “Spectre”, and – although I haven’t seen it – the previews for “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” imply it’s part of the storyline for that movie too. I think it was also part of the storyline for other movies (although I forget which ones). Before this storyline becomes more prevalent, I wanted to mention how I feel about it.
It doesn’t matter how well you know someone or how many tests you put someone through (like the David Fincher movie “The Game” did), it is still IMPOSSIBLE to tell what the person would decide to do for every situation. It’s also impossible to correctly predict the outcome of every situation. As the lyrics to the song “Prime Mover” by RUSH say: “…the point of the journey is not to arrive. Anything can happen.” There are multiple things that can happen which will divert a person from what they’re expected to do.
Also, by saying that James Bond or Ethan Hunt was destined to get to a certain situation means that all the previous things that happened to them in the previous movies were staged or prearranged. There was no chance they’d die – at least not permanently die (there were a few moments when each of them died and then came back to life a few moments later). There was no way the villains in the previous movies would win. For James Bond, there’s no woman that he wasn’t meant to romance.
That sort of makes all the previous movies like WWE wrestling. For some of the WWE superstars, their career path has been written and pre-arranged…. unless they get injured. Even in the world of WWE, something unexpected can happen. If a wrestler gets seriously injured, then whatever was written for the wrestler needs to be put on hold.
In the movie “The Game” there were a few people Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) encountered that help him go where they want him to go. At the end of the movie, one of them mentions “if you didn’t jump, I was supposed to push you off the building.” For that movie, the writers knew that there is absolutely no way to predict what would happen if he was alone.
There have been a lot of other storylines that could never happen in real life that have been overused in movies and television shows – such as time travel. I really hope this doesn’t become another one. I understand if there’s some sort of “divine intervention” with a character, or if a character is supposed to be really lucky (like Ladybug (Brad Pitt) in “Bullet Train”), just don’t take it further than that.
It’s one of the reasons that I DIDN’T see “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning”. If there are more movies with this storyline coming, I’ll be avoiding those too.
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