Exodus (2021) is a fantasy film with elements of drama. The plot is banal. There has been a catastrophe in the world. Ecology is broken. Of course, crime began, the fall in moral principles and everything else connected with this. On the other hand, the basis of human existence is not broken. There is electricity, the houses are warm. People have at least some work. So you can still live somehow. But in one of the few surviving cities, a totalitarian system was established.
No one can just leave the city. Everyone has observers. Everything is being viewed. There is no privacy. The people are subordinate to the city government. And then one person comes across a cassette from which he learns that there is a better life. You just need to find some door that leads to a better world. But how to get there? The door is somewhere. Now, the main thing is to find it. The main character’s world is changing. Now his existence is subordinated to the search for the door.
To understand the movie Exodus (2021), you need to remember the classics. This is the short story “The Door in the Wall” by H. G. Wells. It is dedicated to the hero’s search for a certain door to a parallel world, where he was happy. At the age of five, while playing, he suddenly saw a white wall and a green door in it. Having opened it, the boy found himself in the Garden of Eden. Beautiful animals roamed around, birds sang, green trees grew. And then the boy saw a woman of dazzling beauty.
She spoke kindly to the boy and showed him the book. The boy opened it. There were drawings inside. These were pictures of his life. They walked until the boy opened the door. The boy wanted the woman to open those sheets in which the events are located after the guy entered the door. But the woman flatly refused to open these pages. The boy began to persuade her to turn the pages of the book. And then he saw himself on a familiar street. He was alone and very much saddened by something. Suddenly the boy found himself standing on the city street all alone.
What happened ? It turned out that there was no garden with a door. Years passed and the boy grew up. He played different games with the children. At the age of 10-12, he played a game where he had to get to school from an unfamiliar place. And again he saw a white wall and a green door. But he had to go to school and he did not enter it. At the age of 17, already a young man, he entered the university. And driving in a cab again I saw a white wall and a green door. He could stop the cab and get out, but did not do this, because he could be late for the exams. It would be the collapse of his life and career. As a forty-year-old careerist, he walked past a white wall with a green door. But he didn’t open it again. And then more years passed.
And here he is, an elderly man, having a high position in society, they find him in a deep ditch, dead. It turns out that the workers surrounded the construction site with a wall, but left a door in it for themselves. An elderly man opened it and fell into the trench. Of course, from such a height, flying down, he died. And the writer HG Wells asks the reader the question of whether this person got what he wanted. And what did he discover?
The end of the story is very terrible. Did the boy at 5 years old fell into the afterlife? Who was the woman who met him there? Maybe it was Fate. In some science fiction writers, she appears as a woman with a book of Fate. There will be drawings depicting a person’s life up to death or meeting with it. But why did an innocent boy meet Destiny at the age of five? After all, he had a whole life ahead of him.
This time there is no answer to the question, as well as to why he imagined that door. Maybe it’s because he wasn’t happy with his life. Everything was going smoothly for him. Career and everything. He tried not to disappoint his family. But this is the real slave of society, trying to be like everyone else. To be a cog in the system, otherwise they will suddenly stop their career.
The hero of the film “Exodus” is much more constrained by the framework of society than a person of the 19th century. After all, we are talking about the world of the future, with perfect total control. His search for a door to a better world is far more dramatic than that of a 19th-century man. The totalitarian world suppresses any will and consciousness of the individual. Perhaps, only by opening the door to another reality, you can find peace and happiness. But is there a door? Is it worth giving up what this world gives before looking for a better one? Maybe there are other ways to improve your life than to look for something ghostly? That’s what Exodus is about.
Reminds me of Paul Bunyan’s book Pilgrims Progress.