Why Nr.10 Just Broke Your Brain and What It’s All About. Now, some of you like more mainstream fare. You know who you are. The THiNC. fans that think Primer, The Prestige, and Inception is about as out there as the movie world gets. Yup. Those are great films… no shade from me. But if you think that that is the edge of crazy in the world of Indie Cinematic Technicolor goodness, you are going to want to pass on this movie today. Nr. 10? It’s not for you. So, just slide onward to the next THiNC. post, and maybe it’ll be a little bit more normal normal.
But if WHAT THE HELL, is more your thing? Then Nr. 10 is just the thing for you. Now, the good news for some of you is that “WHAT THE HELL” usually comes with cartloads, metric butt-tons of blood, gore, and sex. But there’s not of that here today. Just a billion girth units of puzzle pieces that may, or may not, add up to anything at all!
Nr. 10 Chronological Walkthrough
In 1975 – a spaceship lands, and drops off 12 children. Maybe. (I’ll get to the maybe in the write up.) Eleven of them go missing… they can’t track them. Vanish completely. BUT! Gunter. They know where Gunter is! And what has Gunter been up to? Well, Gunter has a child, and he is also in a play. He also happens to be in the middle of an affair with the other lead in the cast… the director’s wife. This results in the Director finding out, and his taking revenge on Gunter through the removal of most of his lines in the play.
Simultaneously (and more importantly) his daughter discovers she has only one lung. Which, then brings about the second part of the film – the aliens, from Lunabor, make an allegiance with the Catholic church. It sounds like they have an agreement of some sort. The aliens, being naive, and clueless, are allowing the Catholics to join in their journey home. But more importantly, they want to retrieve Gunter, and his daughter Lizzy…
They convince Gunter to travel home and meet his mother… and Lizzy agrees to come along. But we learn that the Catholics plan to share the message of Jesus with the Lunabors, which they don’t know that they need… Lizzy meanwhile, finds a soundstage where the mother probably filmed the video to her son… which brings up thoughts that maybe it was fake? Or, it was filmed here on earth, not back on their home planet?
We’ll get to the painting in a moment, but the captain notices their blood-lust for all things religious art and general covetousness and is done. He pulls the trigger on the hatch door, and blows all of the “priceless” art out into the oblivion of space… also killing the priests in the process.
Why Nr.10 Just Broke Your Brain and What It’s All About
My mind is split into two different directions on where to start with this movie. At first, the movie is about morality… sin, evil, and justice. And then suddenly, it makes a hard right turn to discuss the ideas around aliens and interplanetary space travel.
But, as much as this movie would like you to think that this is random, and chaotic – a thematic, not story driven, movie… that isn’t true. The thread is clear from beginning to end if you were to just see it from a certain point of view. The movie is asking the viewer a simple question… what would happen if we hadn’t been sold a story that we are flawed and evil? What if we had never been sold a bill of goods for this idea that we are trapped by our morality? Could we see the morality for the lie that it really is?
Think about it this way. Nr. 10 is saying, what if there were a race of people in the galaxy that happened to collide with our world? What would happen? And, what if, they hadn’t had any knowledge or insight into this idea of “God”? And instead, just lived their lives … they went on about their days, didn’t second guess their actions, or their relations to a mythical creator? What if they didn’t consider the ideas of good or of bad? Then, if they were to encounter a Church like the Catholic Church… what would happen? Well, the Church would try to enslave and entrap this new market of religious customers… obviously.
Look at the “Church” that this movie is showing to us. The priests are tantamount to CIA operatives. They conduct endless surveilling operations. They act on their own behalf under no moral code of responsibility (they literally kill someone to get what they want… which is access to this alien market). They steal priceless works of art. They are literally the definition of evil. So the movie has an opinion of what the Church is all about here, and what they are like here on the earth. So when a new planet and a new sales lead is found? What do they do? They go all in to close that sale. They assist the aliens in getting reconnected to Gunter and his daughter. They do anything and everything they have to do in order to sever Gunter’s ties to this planet. And, in so doing, they get access to a birth on this Noah’s Ark 2.0.
Nr. 10 is playing a game of “what if”… and that what if is, could we, Humans, realize the moral debt that the Church has weighted us down with? And, if we did, could we arbitrarily disgorge this debt willingly on our own, as simply as ejecting the Church, its art, its moral proselytizing, and its edicts, as if out of an airlock.
The flaw in this logic is in that the movie has nefarioused the Church into something other than what it is supposed to be – and that is an agent for drawing us closer to Christ. AKA, a moral good in a dark and evil world. Which is the case whether or not the Church exists or doesn’t. To jettison the idea of the Church doesn’t eradicate the need that humans have for a savior. Yes, the Church is broken and in need of a savior too. But punting on the exercise isn’t the solution to the problem of morality. Did you notice that these Aliens lived this life of dunce caps? They were idiots really. Who-me? evil? What’s an evil? Why did they present them this way? Well, because they were hinting that the cause for evil was in the Church’s mere existence. If it weren’t for the Church defining evil as evil we would all be blissfully unaware of evil in the world. But we all know that that is a crock. We are evil all on our own, with or with out the nefarious CIA/Church.
But I digress. The point of the movie is to opine that The Church (uppercase Catholic Church) has locked us in chains of morality. And if we had our crap together, we would break the chains of morality, and just walk away from all of that rubbish weighing us down.
Or I Am Wrong And It’s About Nothing
Or the alternative? The alternative is that the movie is decidedly about nothing at all. That it is a pastiche of images, and nothing more. Or something.
Open Questions???
Yeah, there are about a million open questions. But the most annoyingly corpulent of the lot, is this: “Why did Lizzy find the recording stage on the space ship? What purpose did that serve? And why was so much hay made from the fact that she chose not to tell her father about it?” There are a lot of natural explanations for the stage… mainly that it was a representation of their home, and as they were traveling to earth when he was born, they wanted to represent the home world to convince him to come home. There are some more nefarious reasons I can think of for this as well. AKA, mainly that he wasn’t from a planet like that, this isn’t his mother, etc., etc. And that opens different cans o’ worms, specifically to the aliens actually being all that good. I MEAN THEY JUST EJECTED A PILE OF HUMANS OUT AN AIRLOCK!!!
Edited by: CY