the land of the blind
Parts of After the Dark work, but the whole is lacking... something. One problem: the bunker scenario that drives the film doesn't feel like a last day of senior philosophy class exercise, especially at this international school in Jakarta where, Petra tells us, all the students are overachievers. It feels like a day one exercise. Seriously, I think I used the life raft exercise on either the first or second day of my middle school debate class, and the premise is the same. Given a group of characters with particular occupations (and in our exercise, each with a particular piece of equipment from which he or she could not be separated), we had to limit the pool to as many as the raft could carry. This is not a complex philosophical exercise. It's about as basic as the three examples given early in the film--the trolley problem, the ignorant bliss problem (I wasn't familiar with that one but it seems pretty basic), and the infinite monkey theory... which really, that last...