Firestarter

Who recommended this?

Firestarter wasn’t recommended by anyone. I was on a 15-ish hour flight with a limited selection of Air Canada approved options and I almost didn’t watch it anyway. In fact, Firestarter was consciously passed over during two preceding flights in my four-hop journey. The first flight included a half-hearted viewing of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which, out of respect for the original Ghostbusters, will never be reviewed. For the second flight I chose The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and it left me in an uncharacteristically generous mood. Even so, I nearly stopped watching Firestarter thirty minutes into it. Incidentally, I don’t remember watching anything on the fourth flight… probably because it was the fourth flight.

Mike’s verdict:

At the time, I resolved to make this the first review in a new series tagged Mike Finds Meaning in Shallow Movies. It’s questionable if this actually qualifies as the first of my reviews deserving that tag and I don’t know now if such a series is even likely to emerge, but I think the intention of the tag has significance.

Firestarter is a simple, but precisely laid-out, series of tropes: Action, suspense, tension, surprise, betrayal, redemption, decision, relief, acceptance. Roll credits. On the surface this film purports only to entertain. It has all of the necessary components of a simple thriller intended to help viewers enjoy the passage of (a very short amount of) time.

I will leave it for others to judge how well (or even if) the film accomplishes that objective. But either way Firestarter does not present as a cerebral movie. The viewer must make an effort to read subtext between the lines of dialog.

And the attentive viewer will see below this surface to a potentially uncomfortable thesis.

The central core of the film, shrouded beneath a mantle of sensation, is the awkward conjunction of forgiveness that can be expressed in words, and reprieve that must be actualized. The film suggests that when you hurt someone, it is forever. They may forgive in words, in conscious thoughts, in outward actions; but they do not forget. And you do not forget. It eats at you. It degrades you. It empties you. And it leaves a facade that only looks like the person you were before; the person you wish you could still be. Firestarter reminds us that forgiven is a state of affairs that can’t ever truly be. Forgiven is nothing more than the personification of sorry.

But Firestarter does not make its thesis explicit. The viewer has to ignore the bullshit reasons that each character finds themselves in the presented situations. Moreover, the viewer is expected to think about how they would choose to act in those same situations. The plot is garbage; but the ideas are important.

Firestarter is about decisions. Real decisions. Hard decisions. Decisions that hurt other people; decisions that hurt yourself. It’s about decisions that hurt you because they hurt others, and decisions that present no acceptable options; only equally bad options.

The answer is to just burn it all down. At least, that is Firestarter’s answer.

6/10