Sooner or Later
This short was awesome, but also extremely confusing. The ending left me wondering what was real and was what imaginary. Will the cycle of time travel continue on forever? Or will they get it perfectly right, without the Nazi realizing what’s happening, and be able to move on sooner or later? Did it even happen at all? It’s impossible to know.
My first thoughts in watching this film were, what is the importance of the ash tray? It kept zooming in on it, and it wasn’t until later in the film that the significance of it as a reference point became apparent. It kind of seemed like the prisoner didn’t know what was going on, but at the same time he seems eerily calm. Maybe he’s just wary of what will go wrong with the plan this time, because it seems that this has already happened multiple times, especially when another version of himself shoots the Nazi and then tells him “If I don’t kill him, he shoots you.” Or maybe each time he time travels, its like starting over again. Either way, it almost seems like he has a mission of sorts, especially when the Nazi makes a reference to him volunteering for the test.
I thought the camera shots were especially interesting in this short. You can never really see everything that’s going on. Its normally either on the prisoner’s face or the Nazi’s face (sometimes with a vague image of the prisoner to the side). This keeps the audience in the dark about what is going on - we don’t get the full image of what is happening. But neither does the prisoner, really. Or the Nazi, for that matter. The whole situation is confusing, and it seems that crucial bits of information are missing. I’m not entirely sure what the point of this short was, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that, since the Nazi’s were so awful, they would meet their doom, sooner or later.
