The film has two main lines of revenge: one is the story of Elias' father - a Doctors Without Borders doctor - who treats the "big man" who brutally murdered civilian women in African medical aid; the other is the story of Elias and Christian giving The story of the revenge of Elias' father who was beaten. I have to admit, I didn't understand how these two stories could be connected for the first hour of the film. It took more than 40 minutes before I found out that the doctor who helped Africa was Elias' father. However, the form does not affect the content, and I gradually discovered that two main lines that seem to be unrelated, two worlds of life, actually permeate hatred and violence. Africa's violence is real, racial and explicit; Son's violence is individual and implicit.
It's obvious that Elias' dad has a kind of moral perfectionism or, even more so, "When someone hits you in the right cheek, you have to stretch your left cheek too." When he was hit, he insisted that An individual is an idiot, so he doesn't need to waste his time beating him or reasoning with him; and when the "big guy" who has killed countless people came to him for treatment of his leg injury, he also healed him for the pure morality of "healing the wounded". But the world is not where our wishful thinking is. Disdain for idiots has led to the tragedy of elias and christian; while the unscrupulousness of "big men" has humiliated his morality. In the end, the father saved his son's innocent tragedy, and in desperation, he handed over the "big guy" to the masses. Among the side branches that revolved around Elias's father, is the christian and the African people's "violence with violence", as the father said after christian threatened sofus with a knife, "this is the reason for the war". We all know that violence cannot end with another kind of violence, but violence has never actually disappeared from civilization. Many people insist that ends determine the right means and support necessary violence.
I have to admit that it is really a complex and never clear answer about violence and what views and actions should be held around violence. "It is very likely that institutional morality has become an accomplice, and mere non-cooperation cannot avoid banal evil. Violence and conflict are the remains of human primitive evolution, and the advanced rational cognitive system is not enough to be imprinted into the genetic genes, so we inevitably have to struggle between instinct and rationality.
So is there a solution? The ending of the film does not give a better answer, but at least there is a possible direction: love-emotional communication and understanding. At least in the tears of Christian and his dad, in the kisses of Elias' parents, in Elias's operation to stop strangers from being bombed, we see "love" being promoted as a cliché. But you must know that love is also a rhizome, which can grow on a consistent surface. When love, communication and understanding are configured with each other, violence and hatred will also be balanced.
Finally, it concludes with a passage from Xu Ben's "What Reasons Do People Remember": "Fifty years ago, Sartre and Camus held tit-for-tat amoralism and moral perfection on the issue of violence. Fifty years later Today, intellectual politics needs to have a position that is different from the two, and that is the position of moral imperfection. Amoralism considers the validity of means, not morality. It proves the validity of all means with a "legitimate" purpose. Moral justification. Moral perfectionism believes that no matter how legitimate or noble the purpose is, it cannot justify means that go against moral principles. Moral imperfectionism adopts the standpoint of moral adaptation, and strives to achieve the most morality allowed by actual conditions choice, not absolute moral principles."
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