I hadn’t been to the movies in ages, and so on the weekend I went and saw the new Thriller/Drama/Mystery flick – Buried.
Starring Ryan Reynolds (and literally it’s just Ryan Reynolds!) it was quite an intense film that made quite a few valid political points and actually rather depressed me. Rather than write a synopsis of my own, I will just quote the Internet Movie Database for the plot of the film:
“Waking groggy in pitch darkness, Paul Conroy, an American truck driver working as a contractor in Iraq in 2006, slowly realizes he is trapped inside a wooden coffin, buried alive. With his cigarette lighter, he can see the trap he is in, and he quickly realizes that there's not enough air for him to live long. He finds within the coffin a working cellphone, which allows him contact with the outside world. But the outside world proves not to be very helpful at finding a man buried in a box in the middle of the Iraqi desert. Paul must rely on his best resource—himself.”
‘Buried,’ a film by Rodrigo Cortes, was done on a low budget of $3 million. There were no action shots outside of the coffin that Ryan’s character was trapped in, and the screen was only lit at intervals by a lighter, shoddy torch and glow tube. Now Ryan Reynolds, one of my most drool worthy male actors of all time, is absolutely outstanding in this movie. While it would have been better if there was more light in the film (not possible due to the setting and situation) to admire his fine features, it was clearly evident despite the flickering darkness that it was Ryan’s excellent ability as an actor that made his character so convincingly believable… I too felt claustrophobic along with him! To me this not only proved his remarkable talent, but it demonstrated the power of the human imagination as for the whole 94 minutes I felt on edge as I wondered what would happen next and how he would escape this nightmarish predicament.
Being buried alive is a truly terrible thought. I’d like to think I’d just try and go to sleep and try to just let death take me peacefully, but like in Paul Conroy’s situation, if there was a small glimmer of hope that somehow you could get out you would spend all your time practically trying to do so. I really felt for Paul being stuck buried underground, but one line from the kidnappers also struck a chord for me as they responded to Paul saying that he was not a soldier, he was not attacking them, he was an innocent man and so could they please let him go? They said that they too were normal innocent people, not terrorists, not insurgents, but yet American’s attack their country, bomb their cities, kill their families because of Saadam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. This thought just made me hate the whole idea of war even more then I already do.
Buried was a great movie, but I did find it quite depressing when at the end as Paul was on the phone to the man that said ‘he was on his way to dig him up and yes he was there, hang on Paul!’ only to discover he was at the wrong location. The last moment before Paul’s death he went from having hope that he would be out (and having told his wife that they were coming to get him) to hearing ‘oh god I’m sorry Paul’ and finding out he actually was going to die and not be saved. The feeling of terror and despair washing over him in his last moments would have been horrendous.
The whole movie I thought surely he would get out, something would happen, at the very end when the sand covered his face it would go black and then come up with an ‘after’ scene and he’d be in a hospital with his wife and child by his side….. but no, it didn’t. He was just buried alive :(
I guess that’s why the film was called ‘Buried’.
