Eternal life is a tricky little bugger in film fiction. I’m more fond than I should admit to of an old gothic horror/fantasy sci-fi film, The Asphyx. Just like the physics of zombie existence is all screwed up, when film scientists muddle around with trying to achieve eternal life they often don’t even consider the consequences of what it would actually be to live forever. Spoiler alert - in The Asphyx, the hero is shown through 1970’s practical effects make-up to not being a happy camper at the end of the film.
The other side of the coin to living as a mortal forever is some kind of eternal happiness in a spiritual utopia. Whether this exists or not, I’m in the camp of liking to see a little evidence for it. Something spectacular like an actual showing of a miracle as opposed to arbitrarily citing something explained by statistics - instead of the Didit fallacy.
Filmmakers don’t care about long term timeline issues, trying to cram a story into a time slot to convince your butt to stay seated long enough for the snack purchases and the hope for the inevitable sequel. Some of the long term franchises have entire teams of nerds sifting through the timelines, waiting for the endorphin rush of finding something regarded as a mistake.
One of the most ridiculous examples of messed up timelines is the thoroughly enjoyable, Xena, the Warrior Princess series. The goal was to move the setting to a different location to freshen the storylines instead of having Xena be stuck in Ancient Greece. And the result is an inconsistent mish mash of Xena traveling around to other cultures where they couldn’t possibly coexist together. Like the X-Files, there is an overarching story for a season, peppered with “monster of the week episodes”. Along the way, the stories manage to poke fun at a lot of groups that don’t like to be poked fun at. Including the need to apologize to India for insulting their culture for an entire season, and the Dahak storylines that not so subtilely insult Christianity. Throw in meeting Caesar, and traveling to China etc…how Xena, a tough as nails mortal, but still a mortal gets to live so long is a mystery. This is unaddressed and the viewer is simply left with a, “Hey it’s just fiction. Enjoy the pretty girls kicking ass.”
Then we have Marvel, the king of timeline problems that they insist on fixing with retconning. Mistakes are made over a huge library of films and they address it with a simple addition of exposition or some (lame) scene addition. Still, never explaining how Peter Parker is a teenager for so damn long. Now Deadpool, that’s a character that can always be thrown an excuse that the writers can get away with. He’s basically immortal. So there always a way to explain away how he’s popping up at any spot in the timeline. Like Kang, without the overused film time travel concepts.
Which returns us to The Asphyx, would you really be having…fun?…being immortal. Wouldn’t that get boring? At least Deadpool wouldn’t be old and decrepit like our Asphyx protagonist at movie end. Asphyx was a morality tale, and you can’t get much less moral than a foul mouthed, snarky assassin in spandex. There is an attempt to address his loneliness with a doomed suicide attempt in the second movie. Again, you are not supposed to dwell on the plot device to get the story rolling. Having an enemy is a great distraction to the boredom of immortality.
Vampire lore is a nice step towards middle of the road between bored immortal and frail mortal existence over a normal lifespan. You aren’t indestructible like Deadpool, and the story lines include signs of boredom just with the endless sucking blood to remain alive. Buffy and Angel have stories with a “Just go ahead and end me” plot. But the endgame never makes sense. In theory, there’s not much left to sustain the pseudo immortality of a vampire living in a world of all vampires. The best I’ve seen that covers this is the anthology book, Under the Fang. Written in a shared world style like Robert Asprin’s Thieves World, writers could do their own take on vampire lore, including other writer’s characters. With retconning as needed if you did something extreme - like the Thieves World story where somebody made an unhappy ending for the other writer’s, wait for it…….. immortal character.
But they did finally address the age old problem of how vampires in charge would have to consider keeping some humans around as cattle to feed on. Just like real world humans that don’t like to be enslaved, our vampire controlled cattle make shitty slaves and fight back.
For those that don’t understand that gematria is pure fiction, they miss out on the way the plot holes are covered up. The Didit fallacy abounds. The Jesuits were shoehorned (retconned) in as a substitute for the Freemasons. No explanation for a world full a handful of evil cabal rulers is going to do with a herd of microchipped zombies. There’s only so many ritual sacrifices you can do before you get bored out of your skull. There does seem to be a focus on money, so maybe they can make a Triskelion and bet quatloos on their unhappy slaves fighting in gladiator contests.
But is money really going to make you happy when there’s nobody left to take the money from? What are the odds a starship of fresh gladiators is going to happen on your planet to spice things up?
There’s a distinct lack of thought to what kind of endgame the evil empire has in store. There’s not much fun in everybody operating under the same logical fallacies, arguing over whether the evil empire is headed by A, B, or C. One of the hallmarks of conspiracy thinking. You’re in a group, but you sure don’t act like you’re in a group. And it’s amazing how the current champion of your cause always wants money from you. So good like retconning happiness into your life when that’s gone, too.
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