If you don’t understand the movie dont hate upon it. Try to understand whats making you think this was supposed to be realistic. It was a glorious fun fest of silliness.

Take it down? Hahahahaha. Yeah. No. This post is glorious discussion am argument fodder. Look at all the ink you spilled attempting to prove me wrong?!? Even if I am wrong, ESPECIALLY if I am wrong, there’s absolutely no way I am taking this post down.

Secondly, you’ve obviously have never been here before and you just typed into the google – “SISU explained” and up came my past at number one… which is probably what chaps your hide more than anything. But if you had been here before, you’d know that’s what we do here, think about movies that make you think. Full stop. Sure, movies are entertaining… granted. But we mainly are here to do movie post mortems with the express intent of trying to figure out what makes them tick. And all movies – including “mindlessly entertaining ones” have a logic to them. Maybe especially mindless ones.

I spoke just this past week with an enormous Hollywood director after reading his new script – and all about the internal logic of the film. It’s a screenplay that works and feels just like SISU. And we talked about the motivations of his heroes, about the prime movers that launch the story forward… and about consistency.

And I will say this – there has become a new wave of action movies that I am not a super huge fan of. And I think they come from the CGI/Marvel-ization of movie making. And that is the non-stop action move. Like, literally. Not hyperbolically. The Wicks franchise being a great example. I think it’s fine people like them. I think it’s fine they exist. But when you don’t develop characters, and you don’t embed them in a reality that matters? It just cheapens the movie making experience down to the absolute “coolest” death stunt, or car chase maneuver.

Personally, give me well written characters, with good backstories, and a single room? And I’m happy. Primer – thank you very much. Upstream Color. Yes please. 10×10. Oh yeah. SISU and Wick are just ballet for those who are out of touch with the finer arts. Not hyperbole. Literally – wick is just ballet with guns.

You guys can keep coming at me – please do! I love it. And the more entrenched your argument the more obvious it becomes that I am getting to you. SISU is a groundless action movie that could have been solved by a different final (and first) line of dialogue. But they chose not to. So I’m not letting up.

Also, if morals did matter to this movie I believe you would still be wrong. You know what’s arguably more morally questionable? WANTING to participate in war and kill people. People aren’t driven by the idea that other people should need to die. No sense of nationalism will make people actively want war, if it does those people are morally corrupt. They made it explicitly clear he was done with that, which if you ever actually looked into the history of wars is a pretty WIDELY shared sentiment among individuals.

Lastly, even seeking revenge and killing to get back to his gold I would argue is not morally corrupt. Why? Probably because the movie showed and gave you and the protagonist of Sisu every reason on a silver platter to hate every single nazi that was killed, not that you should truly have needed a reason to but it still went out of its way to do that (not even Inglorious Bastards went this far to do the same). Killed horse, raped women, used women as fodder to clear mines, tried to murder dog, taped bomb to dog, burned village, hung innocents, treated comrades as expendable, betrayed comrades unexpectedly, attempted murder over and over again the whole movie plus theft just over gold. He had every reason to kill them.

It’s plainly evident you didn’t understand the direction of the movie or the message. Keeping your post up will only serve to misdirect others who haven’t seen it into believing the movie is trying to be something that it’s not (moralistic) by giving them an extremely biased perspective of the film. This really all just boils down to the film not being for you in the end.

Thank god to all the commenters who provided unbiased perspectives that can give page visitors a more accurate view.

Jay – a truer thing was never said – but I take it as a compliment you think this my job. Or my profession. So I got that going for me today.

I get it that most – 99%? – loved this movie. I enjoyed it on the merits. But what you aren’t understanding is that I’m making a moral point. When the writers chose WWII as their basis for this fictional flight of fancy, they screwed up. At a time when the world needs him, and his obvious skills at killing, he took a vacation to pan for gold. Possibly the most self serving, and selfish human on the planet. And then, when he found it – the gold – all he could think about was protecting it and nothing else.

That’s the point I was making. And everyone reading this piece – and it’s been well over, hold please, 50,000 people who have tripped through here since I wrote it – disagrees. And that is fine! Great even. I do not try to run in the mainstream of thought for movies. You and the normal movie watching ilk can prefer Marvel movie cotton candy as opposed to movies that will make you think or push you intellectually. Great. But that isn’t what I do here. If you wanted a glass tipping to this technicolor blood splattering – head to ain’t it cool, or hell, rotten tomatoes. Both have their purposes.

So no, with your comment, I am not suddenly going to say – damn… you are right, I should get another job. And I should write about movies in a more mainstream way. Not happening. I believe in the movie watching audience. I believe that they can think, as opposed to slurping down more insipid pablum.

Did I like the movie? Yeah sure. Minus the fact that the hero wasn’t heroic. That’s all. But thanks for adding to the page views and reads Jay. Better yet, thanks for commenting and kicking that SEO juice up just one more notch! Hahahah.