Lol I'd say the cop made a foolish mistake by not bringing backup and checking the room where Owen hid, but as for breaking down the door (he knew someone was in Abby's apartment, as Owen accidentally made a noise and Thomas was already dead), he may have just had an arrest-warrant in his pocket.sauvin wrote:I'll agree that movies shouldn't need books to fill in what the movies don't explain. This is part of the fascination with LTROI, that it has elusive subtleties. The only major "unexplained" in it that I find is exactly what Hakan is supposed to be; most of the rest of the salient content is there to be studied. By contrast, the only thing I find in LMI that's not outwardly explained is the cop's busting down Abby's door.
(You don't see it, but there is a full investigation going on. Notice how the cop said things, such as to Thomas "We will track down anybody you're working with," and there were scenes where other policemen where present.) As for the policeman's immediate suspicion of Thomas being a Satanic cultist, there was actually a time period from the 1970's to the 1990's known as the "Satanic Panic," where all over the world, widespread fear of Satanic cults committing horrific crimes gripped everyone's minds, including the minds of the cops. (As they were blissfully unaware of the fact that most of these "crimes" were no more than urban legends. If you wonder why everyone was so afraid, you can thank the news for sensationalizing on these urban legends.)sauvin wrote: LMI did a great job at showing a society in which everybody does his own thing and doesn't really have much to do with anybody else. There's no China Restaurant Scooby Gang to notice that Thomas and Abby moved into Janne's old place, and no Goesta to go to them in shock to report Jocke's murder. There's no Scooby Gang to try to convince him to report what he'd seen to the police. It's not apparent that Virginia has any idea who anybody else is in the movie, for example, where LTROI's Virginia knew everybody. Nobody, in fact, seemed to know anybody else. What there is is an apparent stay-at-home Mom who festoons her apartment with a random lot of religious artifacts while sucking down cheap dinner wine by the gallon and watching a plastic electronic church on TV. Contrast this with Oskar's mother, who (in the movie, anyway) seemed very well put together, kept it clean, kept it well-ordered and may have had a regular job. There's no "community" in 1982 Los Alamos, and this is one of the major differences between the two movies.
I have no idea what Reeves might have wanted to illustrate, but as far as I can see, there was no "police investigation", there was a single cop who seemed to have something of a crusade going on against "cults". The surface idea was that the cop had no idea what he was really looking for because it was hidden - Abby is very adept at hiding - but the subtext is a tired old American trope from the 50's that Authority is clueless and ineffectual, together with some relatively new subtext that Authority can also be rash, overhanded and dangerous to themselves and to others.
Empty politics on TV in an abandoned hospital lobby, empty religion on the TV playing out for a lonely woman lost in a pickled slumber, empty or absent community, empty authority (not only in the guise of a bumbling cop but also as manifested by a school system that has little idea what's happening to its kids, and seeming to care less), all of these things are reflected in distilled and purified essence both as Owen sits in an empty wintertime courtyard gobbling down empty calories and absently singing a commercial jingle "Eat some now, save some for later" and as he sits in the train with his terrifying new girlfriend in a footlocker at his feet singing the exact same thing in a very different emotional context.
I think I understand what you're saying about the community in LMI. I think it exists in the story (it's not like everyone magically disappears when Owen doesn't look, right?), but kept deliberately unseen, as the view of the community is limited to Owen's perspective. He watches his classmates in the pool, his neighbors through the windows, but never speaks to them. A memorial for the first person killed by Thomas on screen is set up in the fence of the school by local students and residents, but being from Owen's perspective, he never talks to or listens to other kids talking about what happened, as the faces of other students are blurred out as their voices are muffled while he walks down the hallways of the school. Subtleties such as these help to enforce his sense of isolation to the audience, as he is barely seen talking to anybody except for Abby, and confides in her that he wants to leave Los Alamos because of his dislike of the community. I think, while LTROI (While I love the book and it's film adaption, my criticism is only that LMI did a better job at fleshing out the story on screen) explores how the whole living community of Blackeberg is affected by Eli's presence, LMI explores how the community of Los Alamos is nothing to Owen but a ghost to remind him of his agony, and Abby comes along and serves as his escape from it. (I think LMI was amazing as it is, though I'd admit, if I had it my way, I would do what neither film did, and add a scene exploring the community's reaction after the pool sequence. THAT would be interesting to see!
)That's the problem that the Swedish film has, the thing is, you don't want things to be too ambiguous. Some details to the Swedish film's plot would be appreciated by viewers who read the book, but their significance may not be understood by viewers who didn't read it. In LMI, Thomas is a more fleshed out and human character than Hokan in the Swedish film. Hokan felt too much like a shallow ghost of the wonderful character he was in the novel, as he was seen for part of the film, and then, *poof*, he's dead and completely vanished. You feel sorry for him as you watch the Swedish film, but unless you read the novel, you'd hardly remember him as a character.jetboy wrote:LMI is the movie that has everything handed to the audience whereas LTROI has much more going on behind the scenes. As a matter of fact, so much of LTROI's ambiguity was stolen by LMI like Thomas having been with Abby since childhood.
I liked LTROI's film adaption, I have nothing against it, but my criticism is that I thought it didn't flesh out and humanize the story and characters as well as I thought LMI did.
