The Zohar Secret is Indie Indie Goodness. Give me a movie that shows chutzpah and drive. If you’ve got $300 and you still find a way to get your bootstrapped ideas out the door? I’m here for it. Does it have to be Hollywood-Michael-Bay perfection? NO! I’d actually prefer it if it wasn’t. Just come with your original ideas and don’t capitulate to the overriding idea that you have to climb into the box that Hollywood has made for itself. And today? I have a movie that makes other movies blush they are so well-funded. After a little bit of research I realized this was a kickstarter?? No way. Check it out right here. Apparently they made the film for $50k??!? Sure, Primer was made for a paltry $7k – we all know that. But did Primer try to do 15 different epochs and locations? No, Shane Carruth spent $50 on some PVC pipe, some plastic wrap, and a storage shed and called it a day.
Oh, and hey – thanks @Gastroschisis for your recommendation.
I’ve wandered around the interwebs trying to gauge the response to this movie, and in my non-scientific survey, the world definitively did not get this movie. Wait. That is not true… the world didn’t make it past the first 30 minutes of this movie. The raw number of cuts? There were a ton of jumps and the makers of this film didn’t try too hard to not lose the audience. And if you didn’t give this film the extra line it needs in order to unveil itself, you’ll just become yet another internet commenter wondering what the heck you just watched.
The Zohar Secret Walkthrough
I am not deep-diving this one. Not gonna do it. no no. But it’s a pretty predictable script once you see the cadence of it, and understand the purpose of the early repetitions.
The movie opens with Max waking from a head injury in 1290 Palestine. He is groggy and confused and doesn’t understand what is going on. But eventually we learn that there is a scroll… a section, a missing piece of the Zohar Secret that needs to be returned. He also learns that if someone reads the Zohar Secret they will awaken. You see:
“Most people don’t even suspect they are asleep…
Every person has an inner mechanism
But for the time being it’s dormant
And if you read this scroll, it maintains a code to activate your inner mechanism
to lead yourself out of this dream, to a new level of existence.”
And from here on out, we watch as Max bounces from age to age. He goes from Palestine to the Crusades, to Venetia, then jumps forward to Holland in 1730, etc., etc. And along the way, he regularly collides with himself, and this alternate version of himself tells him that he needs to get the scroll returned. Nothing else matters. Here’s the interesting bit – there are two currents of thought running through Max’s mind. One, to stop the jumping, stop the dying, stop the chaos, to forget this weird mission of returning the scroll. His other thought being to just find a lovely woman, to settle down, and to have a normal life. IE, to forget this insanity. Max’s alternative self makes it clear – every time he refuses, he’s just delaying the inevitable.
So onwards Max goes, from America to Africa in the 1890’s, then France, and Russia, and eventually he agrees to return the scroll, he’s done running. And there in Russia, he shows himself the invention of cinema, wherein he sees his past life in choppy black and white. (It’s a pretty clever play.) And Max is told that the director of his film is asking him to play it well, and if he does, then the director will be happy with him. And then, he vaults forward into a concentration camp… and that there is a field that encompasses everything. It’s like the film… it’s a projection, everything exists in the projection, not on the screen. That life itself is an illusion… that all life outside yourself is an allusion. (Which, if you think about that too hard, the fact that these truths came out in Nazi Germany is a bit offensive… but we’ll let that slide for now.) And then he jumps to an asylum where he’s been a patient for 6 months… he checked himself in even. Here he has a wife awaiting his return, and a daughter… but his alternative self makes fun of himself for inventing such a trite and unoriginal life.
“You were tasked with finding and destroying the scrolls because they contradicted the Roman foundational worldview. The scrolls spoke of a different path, and you tried to exploit the knowledge of the scrolls. But it was only the first scroll – which is why you lost your memory.” Jump to an American battlefield, where Max is killed. Then jump to a post apocalyptic world where he actually arrives in the final location where he can return the scroll. Just return it, you are here! But Max is have an existential meltdown about how none of this is making any sense at all. “There is nothing left but pain.”
And that is when his alternate self tells Max that he has been at this very spot before… but he has always refused to return the scroll. And when Max shoots his alternate self, he realizes he’s actually killed his wife instead. “You’ll need to start over again. Keep coming back here until you fulfill the mission… BAM!”
Jump to a scientific mission wherein a scroll is found that will allow humanity to “decipher the secret” meaning for the book of Zohar. (Which, makes no sense, because Max read the scroll at the beginning of the movie, and it is how he was so messed up the entire movie.) Then, as they translate it, we learn that at the beginning, there was one, and this one could not grasp the perfection within which it existed. And as a result it had to be split up into a myriad pieces. And now, having reached the maximum splitting point, the inertia is causing the pieces to reassemble. And as we conjoin more and more, we begin to assemble new sensory organs and capabilities. And with its new found senses it begins to perceive its own perfected state.
Then there, behind the scientist, is Max… walking from one lab to another. The end.
Someone Explain What I just Watched in The Zohar Secret
If you’ve studied religions at all, you will instantly recognize this as a very basic New Age idea. Nothing wrong with that… just calling it out for what it is. You know, the idea that we are all shards of god – all of us are separate pieces of a larger whole. Not pantheism, solotheism? hahah. But ultimately the point is that we to attempt to transcend this unenlightened state, open our spiritual eyes to the singular truth around us, that we are all one with this unifying force idea. And that it is through this singularity that we can be enlightened to our – not our godliness – but to our godnessism. Or whatever.
But what I haven’t heard before, this idea that there is a maximum splitting point. As if an infinite being has an maximum tensile strength wherein its shardability meets its limit. I have always thought that reincarnation needed an idea similar to this, but inverted. That 8 billion on the planet didn’t pose a problem somehow to this fantastical idea that I was Prince William, and before that a Celtic that erected Stonehedge (ever notice that reincarnationists were always someone cool? They are never a pauper, or a cobbler, or the guy at the circus clinging up the elephant crap? I digress)… okay I’m stopping.
The clever thing that I related to was this idea that we were all made for something more than the physical reality staring us in the face. That I am more than my little blog, and the way I make some money during the day. And this idea really didn’t come from New Age, but rather from Socrates’ Allegory of the Cave. The idea is simple, all humans are actually chained to a wall, in a cave. The only thing that they can see is the wall in front of them. This is their reality. And behind them is a fire – and between the fire and the wall, some one arranges shapes to block the fire-light with. And this is our perceived reality. This world of shadows. Then one day, the Philosopher King breaks free, heads out into the sunlight… now, the question is… should he run out and live his new 3D life? Or should he go back and free the others in the cave?? (Yes, this sounds like The Matrix, and a billion other books and movies.) But it’s this larger idea that we need to be awakened. That we need to see our lives for more than the two dimensional silhouettes that they are.
Personally, I’m not a fan of the idea (theologically speaking) that we are all god. Nope. But, is there something else here? So, I am guessing, that maybe the movie is about our unlocked potential. About leaping across the spiritual divide of life and tapping into your potential? Maybe? Who knows. What did you think this movie was all about?
Edited by: CY
