Movie Review--Saw

"Yes, I'm sick, officer.  Sick from the disease eating away at me inside.  Sick of those who don't appreciate their blessings.  Sick of those who scoff at the suffering of others.  I'm sick of it all!"
--Jigsaw, Saw

"Most people are so ungrateful to be alive.  But not you.  Not anymore."
--The Billy Puppet, Saw



The first in a seven part series that is soon to have an eight installment in 2017, Saw dramatically injected new interest and life into its peculiar genre.  It amounts to a blend of horror elements, mystery, a detective thriller, and a setting that reminded me of what I've heard of Sartre's No Exit.  Maybe the second one actually parallels No Exit better.  Admittedly, I'm a huge fan of the Saw franchise, and as some Christians might assume that such a dark movie about a serial killer possesses no redeeming value or distinguishable features, I need to counter their misunderstanding.  Just in case someone has not yet come to understand the morality of viewing violence or profanity I have included an excerpt from a post where I briefly addressed this:

"And people can't object to violence and profanity as universal reasons why someone shouldn't play a game because there is no objective line that marks when something has become too violent or too riddled with profanity.  Some people will watch a movie or play a game with mild, infrequent profanity or with a few bloodless killings.  Doing so does not at all mean they will begin practicing these things.  But their neighbor might be fine with slightly more profanity and deaths involving more brutality.  Then someone else may watch movies with strong profanity and more intense violence but think that entertainment with constant profanity and extreme torture is wrong.  Where can we draw the line?  While the Bible prohibits the actions of murder and assault and kidnapping and robbery, we cannot claim there is some way to know if visual depictions of such things go "too far".  God has revealed no special knowledge on this matter.  And no one can propose a universal standard here without committing at least one of several logical fallacies, most likely an emotional appeal.  People can't agree on where the line is, and even if they did agree their consensus does not prove they are right.   If one feels uneasy about playing a game (or anything else), they do not have to continue.  Paul is clear in Romans 14 that some disputable matters must be resigned to individual discretion, with the principle that as long as one does not have a troubled conscience on the matter there is no sin [1]."

I find it very odd that Christians will defend watching Passion of the Christ with its extreme depictions of sadistic torture that the Romans actually inflicted on real people and at the same time will shun watching a movie like Saw that contains far less graphic material, a legitimate point, and completely fictitious content.  But then again, evangelicals excel at contriving bizarre double-standards and exceptions to nonexistent moral rules.


Production Values

While Carey Elwes and Tobin Bell have roles in this film, the writer Leigh Whannell decided to attempt acting in the role of one of the two central protagonists.  Amusingly, he fails almost the whole time, especially in one of the most unintentionally-funny and terribly-acted fake death scenes of all time.  The film structure is very clever and unique, and the execution is fantastic, yet unfortunately this introduction to the series does have a poor budget, but hey, I saw The Conjuring 2 this summer and James Wan has come a very long way since 2004 when it comes to production value.  It is a blessing to Saw fans like me that the production values and budget of the sequels far exceeds the meager financial limitations of the first movie.


Story

(Spoilers are included below)

Using a deliciously clever and original idea (okay, they it have been partly inspired by Se7en) as the plot hook, this movie opens with a man named Adam awakening in what appears to be an abandoned underground bathroom with one other man and a dead body in between the two.  Neither can escape because each has a leg shackled to the pipes around them.  A recorder and two cassettes are found, each cassette sharing a message for one of the two men, with a dramatic mission for Adam's companion.  The man trapped with him, Doctor Gordon, is tasked with killing Adam before six o'clock that night.

As the two struggle to identify clues and remember what happened before they were unwillingly taken to the bathroom, Doctor Gordon suspects this is the handiwork of the infamous Jigsaw Killer--a psychopathic serial killer still at large.  Well, maybe not a serial killer exactly.  "Technically speaking he's not really a murderer.  He never killed anyone," Gordon explains.  Instead of personally extinguishing the life of his victims, the elusive Jigsaw places them in traps or "games" intended to test their willingness to survive and which challenge them to grasp the value of life.

"I want to play a game", the psychopath informs them through eerie homemade video clips explaining the rules and objective for their tests.  "Live or die.  Make your choice."  One man had to navigate a barbed wire maze, a drug addict had to find a key in what she thought was a corpse to escape a "reverse bear trap" attached to her jaw, and so on.  The legendary reverse bear trap first appears here, though only in the seventh movie is someone killed with one onscreen.

Those who can stomach watching until the end will witness one of the absolute best last-minute plot revelations in not just horror but cinema in the 2000s.  Seriously, it's amazing.


Intellectual Content

The story structure doesn't permit the same exploration of Jigsaw's unique moral and philosophical views as the sequels allow for due to the fact that the focus in the first movie rests on two men in an isolated room trying to recall their respective kidnappings, but the clear motivation for the Jigsaw Killer is to bring his victims to appreciate their lives and to not take their blessings for granted.  He cannot stand watching people squander their lives with addiction, ungratefulness, and inactivity.

When the drug addict, named Amanda, approaches the body of her "cellmate" to extract her key, I noticed a message written on the wall and I paused the movie to read it.  Interestingly, it read:

"If you try to keep your life for yourself, you will lose it.  But if you give up your life to find me, you will find true life."

A word or two may have been different, as it was difficult to read some of them, but the meaning is obvious.  It seems to parallel the words of Jesus in Matthew 16 where he teaches that those who seek their lives will forfeit them but those who surrender their lives for Christ's sake will find them.  Jigsaw, like Christ, wants to reforge people and expose their errors and faults in the name of transforming them and purging their sins away.  When officers interrogate Amanda, she says something unexpected about Jigsaw: "He helped me."  Just what exactly she saw more clearly after surviving her bear trap is slightly unclear, but it no doubt had to do with renewed appreciation for life.

By far the most sophisticated and intriguing villain I can think of in a movie series, Jigsaw is introduced with great effect to later become understood as someone who views himself as the moral reformer of a corrupt society.  The sequels only unveil more of his elaborate philosophy [2] and elevate him to a status where the franchise mythos has practically deified him.

In the installments after Saw III, the view of Jigsaw imparted subtly drifts from him being a demented psychopath to perhaps the only guardian of justice and redemption in a depraved and unnamed city.  Yes, Jigsaw's worldview combines torturous death traps with benevolent lessons of conscience and forgiveness, and no one I can think of could pull off the air of intellectual and moral enlightenment paired with obvious hypocrisy and inconsistency better or more convincingly than Tobin Bell.  So well does Tobin Bell immerse himself in his iconic role over the duration of seven movies that the vast majority of viewers can't imagine any other actor stating the same lines, much like how no one can fathom someone besides Hugh Jackman nailing the role of Wolverine.

Ah, there is much more to write about Jigsaw, but I must save material for my reviews of the remaining movies.


Conclusion

Initiating a highly successful series and managing to showcase a great story despite its budgetary restrictions, Saw entertains, raises questions, and ends with the unusual plot device of the villain winning or at least seeming to.  Despite criticisms that insist the opposite, there is fascinating intellectual and philosophical depth found throughout the seven-part series.  Saw grapples with questions that interest everyone who cares about knowing reality, as do its sequels.  Is life worth living?  What does it mean to live a good life?  What is the nature of right and wrong?  Can evil be committed so that good may result?  What is justice?  Can humans change their flawed behaviors?  Can we expel our flaws from our lives through willpower or do we need a dramatic moment like a deathtrap game to force us to do so?  Seeing as these questions inevitably and exclusively remain in the realm of the philosophical and the theological, Christians shouldn't necessarily shy away from this movie.

I can't wait for Saw: Legacy, the eighth movie and seventh sequel (or perhaps a reboot?), to be released next year.  It's a good time to be a Saw fan.



Content
1. Violence:  While the subject matter is intended to be somewhat disturbing, the camera, for the most part, deflects its gaze at moments when something graphic is about to happen.  The most graphic scenes are the depiction of a corpse entangled in barbed wire with deep lacerations on the skin and the portrayal of a woman fingering a man's internal organs to locate a key implanted in his body after slicing his stomach open (offscreen).  Even when a certain character removes his own foot in a classic scene, the amputation is strictly off camera; all that is shown is the blood drawn by the first few saw strokes on the skin.  The gore is almost nonexistent, though the rest of the series increases it quite a bit.
2. Profanity:  This movie has plenty of profanity, though not necessarily as much as later films in the series. The words "f-ck" and "sh-t" comprise much of it.


[1].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-artistic-legitimacy-of-gaming.html

[2].  Okay, Saw: The Final Chapter disappointed in many ways, including the fact that it didn't deepen understanding of Jigsaw, partially because he only appeared in two very brief scenes.  For the rest of the series, my point stands.