So Woke It’s Comatose: In the Shadow of the Moon
By Jake Hate
Jim Mickle (We are What We Are) has directed better films than his latest outing, In the Shadow of the Moon. The fault isn’t so much Mickle’s directing, nor is it the fault of actors who give fine performances, the problem lies in it’s script written by Gregory Weidman and Geoff Tock. Weidman and Tock have written a time travel story, which comes with its own propblems of inherent logic, but their biggest stumble by far is their smack dab in the middle of woke ideology that drives the story. In Aristotle’s Poetics he points out that all stories come with a begginning, a middle and an end, but it is the end that is the chief thing of all. It is that chief thing that make this movie such a muddled mess.
This mess begins with a gruesome mass murder in 1988, ending in tragedy before jumping to 1997 and then 2006 and then 2015 as we come to better undertand this story involves time travel. Time travels stories are almost always rife with implausibilities. The Spanish film Time Crimes comes to mind as one that almost avoids that, but relies upon a silly plot device of bandage wrappings that make the rest of otherwise well thought out and structured film kind of silly. In the Shadow of the Moon doesn’t even come close to rising to the level of silly is just insipid.
It’s never clear why the films protaganist Thomas Lockhart (played by a game Boyd Holbrook) is so self destructively obsessed with the one case he follows from being a uniformed police officer to begin with, then a homicide detective and finally, after losing his job, a private detective who just cannot let what appears to be strange and unexplainable serial killings. This obsession has led to an estragement with his daughter and it’s never made clear who actually raised his daughter but it doesn’t look like it was Thomas. It seems to have fallen upon his brother-in-law Micheal C. Hall (Dexter), Holt, but Weidman and Tock’s script isn’t concerned with this, instead all designed to facilitate a time travel story that ulimately becomes its undoing.
All stories have a begginning, a middle and an end, but it is the end that is the chief thing of all. Weidman and Tock’s end is a ludicrous conceit symptomatic of modern “woke” culture. What Wiedman and Tock have concocted is an apocalypic tale where apparently the technology is such that they’re unable to recover from this apocalypse, but have developed the technology of time travel and the best they can do with this is to go back and time and murder those they hold responsible for propagating dangerous ideas that apparently led to this apocalypse.
It is, at its heart, an anti-free speech message. The irony of that alone seems to fly over the heads of the filmmakers. The absoltue surrender to the notion that there are no rational arguments against these dangerous ideas is pathetic. There is no wisdom in preaching the best answer to dangerous ideas is to kill the messenger. Sunlight on ideas is always the best and surest way of identifying dangerous ideas and to be the kind of critical thinker that can counter such dangerous ideas with rational arguments requires the ability to know these dangeous ideas well enough to understand those arguments.
Killing off people won’t do a thing to stop the spread of dangerous ideas. If they’re going to spread they will do so because the people are sufficiently stupid enough to fall for them. The much harder task is, of course, countering that. It just won’t work by some sick serial killings all the name of a better tomorrow. Too many tyrants have risen and wrought their terrible swift sword upon those they deemed “deplorables” or whatever label they can justify killing.
In these modern times a particular brand of wokeness insists that certain speech should not be allowed. This is the very essence of comatose wokeness. An absurd mindlessness that desperately wants to cloak itself as virtue. There is nothing virtuous about silencing others simply because of disagreement. If wokeness isn’t a virtue then it is surely a vice. If wokeness cannot withstand the rigor of intellectual honesty it has no hope of achieving any virtue. A time travel tale where future inhabitants go back in time to effectively make these arguments and get through to people, inspiring them to make the time they need to sharpen their wits to the point they will not fall prey to dangerous ideas, now that would have been woke.