"There Are Things God Will Never Forgive"

A Review of Murder on the Orient Express
by Courtney Hilden
Spoiler Alert!: Some of the clues to this shockingly good mystery are revealed in this review.

There are few murder mysteries that are recognizable even to non-mystery fans: Ten Little Indians, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Murder on the Orient Express. The last has recently been adapted for a movie, and it blows most mysteries out of the proverbial snow drift, painting everything in snow white and murky gray, meditating on faith and justice, filled with hubris and the empty feeling of being near death, leaving the main character and the audience as cold as the winter world outside the train cars on the Orient Express.
The story follows Poirot on a trip aboard the title train. It is only through befriending the train's owner that he secures for himself aboard. Sometime the first night the lodger in the room next to him dies after being stabbed several times in several odd ways. Poirot, despite his reluctance, begins to solve the crime.
Smart choices are made by the creators. The music during the opening scene (in which Poirot gives one of his celebrated analysis-turned-interrogation only to have the criminal commit suicide in front of him) is dissonant and perfect, like the sound Lost used to signify it was flashing back, forward, to the side or where ever else that show wanted to go.
Toby Jones, last seen playing the Dream Lord on Doctor Who, brings another thankless but great small performance in the role of the victim. He gives us no question to his vileness or how he is used to getting what he wants, but leaves us to ponder his repentance. David Morrissey and Hugh Bonneville also give their normal level of top-notch performing.
There are even brief moments of humor in an otherwise deeply serious film. At one point a character uses the word “Bastard” and then apologizes, asking everyone to excuse “her French.” “It is indeed a French word,” Poirot replies.
Thematically, the connection between faith and justice is made. Poirot, a Catholic, believes in justice through the courts, yet many of the other train passengers clearly believe in picking up where God, if he exists or not, exacting revenge. Shots of rosaries, one of the few things that could logically be on a train are used throughout. The thing that is particularly smart about all of this is that the story never makes a blatant judgment on the moral standings of these characters. It would be easy to descent into this, but by making no one right and no one wrong, the audience if left to contemplate the nature of right and wrong on their own. Films without answers are always the ones that stay with us the longest, and, even though the mystery of who murdered the train passenger is solved, the mystery of what is right and wrong, of what God asks us to do, and what justice really is remain as mysterious as the murder was in the beginning.

In most films with this kind of moral conundrum, the murderers would then be shown as self-made monsters, who, now that they have taken the law into their hands once are willing to do it once again. Instead, they wisely speak to one another, as a counsel, as their own appointed God, and this leaves their previous actions look all the more noble, since they are capable of sticking themselves to a very hard, though different from Poirot’s, moral standard.
It's not a flawless film. Poirot's habit of speaking in third person is still irritating.
The film also flirts around an Imperialist interpretation of the so-called Middle East. Turkey, where the film begins, is depicted with every stereotype of the region you can think of: violent, hateful towards women and uncivilized.
Poirot himself has always been the weakest thing about these outings. These days, with characters on tv on other mystery shows like Bones, Law and Order, CSI, etc. that contain detectives as dark, interesting and surprising as their suspects, it's no longer acceptable to have detectives who blandly sit in as the observer for the audience. They have to being going through something during the crimes, they have to be emotionally invested, and, if possible, dark and just barely able to put on the show of being okay.
Poirot, despite the revelation at the end, stays as static at the end of the film as he was at the beginning. He’s shaken, sure, but he shows no signs of changing his views. He’s just as much as an unfeeling and severe hardass at the beginning as he is at the end. No matter how glazed over his eyes are through much of the film or the waterworks that happens at the end, the audience is left with no question as to his unbowed point of view. What would be really fun to watch is him changing his mind, or even better, changing how he handles crime. As chilling as the weather or the crime in this story, nothing is as chilly as someone unable to consider the other side’s argument. No one wants to watch a guy so hard-wound that he specifies to waiters that he wants his eggs to be the exact same size.

The End

by Courtney Hilden
Spoiler Alert!: The ending to Lost's finale episode is discussed in this review.

So, here I am, having just watched the series finale of Lost. I'm pretty stunned.
I guess, after all this time, that I should have known that this was a long con, and that none of the people ever survived, they just died in that plane crash. The show as we saw it was an opportunity for them to each find their own redemption. The ones who did presumably moved on to heaven and those who didn't continued to live in an unreal, painful existence. This show worked awful hard for us as viewers to believe in that redemption and for us to buy into the final part of episode.
As to the Sawyer/Kate/Jack triangle: there's a part of me that wished they wouldn't answer the question, because I feel like these three are best with all the tension between them. (And seriously, wouldn't it be great if the show had Sawyer/Jack?) I wanted the three of them to be the guardians of the island, because, as Jack himself said so early on: "live together, die alone."
It was good to see so many of our favorite characters again: Juliet, Boone, Shannon, Daniel, even Vincent showed up.
I love that Juliet ended up being Jack's ex-wife, and that they were capable of getting along with each other even after their divorce. I also love that Boone and Shannon were found in a bar fight. (Isn't that where Christian should have been?) I'm glad that some of our favorite couples, notably Charlie and Claire, were reunited.
The episode had some great funny moments. Kate telling the Lockness Monster that she had "saved him a bullet," was the kind of classic quip you'd expect on Buffy. I also love the great discussion surrounding ducktape. "I don't believe in much," Miles told us, "but I do believe in ducktape." Amen! It was these little details in the episode that made it fun to watch, especially for fans who could spot moments that were based off of earlier parts in the series, like Smokey and Jack lowering Desmond down to see the light and Kate and Charlie being present for Aaron's birth.
In fact, it was those details that were similar to the Charlie-centric episode "Greatest Hits." It reminded the audience of all of those characters and moments that they loved most.
The best part of the episode? The action, unquestionably. Watching Jack and Smokey the Lockness Monster square off on that cliff, fighting it out, with his knife in the traditional place that Locke always kept it was wonderful and amazing.
As always, I'm still left with some questions. I'm not a super fan of the show, so sometimes I wonder if it's just my lack of knowledge or if I'm supposed to be wondering those things. I want to know how Desmond knew about the bright light at the center of the island. Was this part of the knowledge he gained after Charles Widemore put him through that electromagnet test? I'm also curious as to if the white hair that Richard found was there because Richard wanted to really live again or if it was because Jacob's final destruction removed the magic keeping Richard in stasis. And how did the Lockeness Monster get that boat to stay?
And there were a lot of things that I was unhappy with. I'm still very iffy on this whole "they were really dead all along" business, since I was hoping for something more profound. I wanted Ben to make it off the island. And I disapprove of Sawyer/Juliet. I feel like Juliet belongs with someone else, though the whole "we can go Dutch" call back was awesome.
I guess what really bothered me about the ending to the show was that it's unclear to me if good and evil exists or if they're just part of a bigger plan that is beyond such a dichotomy. The ending made me wonder if the world we've been watching for six seasons was real or if it was the Sideways world. I'm inclined to believe, as previously stated, that the Sideways world was the real one, and that our characters are dead. But then I wonder about the Present world: did the airplane make it off the island? Where did those characters go? Or were those last shots of the crash supposed to tell us that crashed and died too? The lack of clear answers for these new mysteries is frustrating. It left me feeling like this wasn't so well-planned, it just kind of looks that way.
The final flew by amazingly fast, especially given how much information they had to soar through. I'm glad it's over in some ways, since it's a relief, but I'm sad since I'm already missing my favorite characters. If Sawyer wants to come live with me and give me a nickname, that'd be fine by me.
Overall? This finale was no where near as good as Buffy the Vampire Slayer's, which will probably always be the finale to beat in sci-fi fantasy shows. At the same time, it wasn't as overbearing or disappointing as Battlestar Galactic. It was sort of meh, which is too bad, because all the fans expected better.