Jacob's Ladder [HD]

Profoundly moving journey to enlightenment
I wonder if this movie could be made today - after all, it doesn't have any computer-generated special effects, it demands the viewer's complete attention, and really needs to be seen more than once to appreciate fully the meaning of all of the scenes. Incredible too is that the writer (Bruce Joel Rubin) was working on the filming of this and his more popular movie "Ghost" at the same time. Director Adrian Lynne wisely avoided some of the more sacharrine touches that Rubin had in the original script (such as the view of "Heaven") and added many subtle disturbing elements of his own. The final result is a film that you will think about long after you see it, a man's journey through the bardo state to his final enlightenment. In a way, this is the cinematic equivalent of a Pettersson symphony - an emotional catharsis after the long, dark night of the soul. I'm not ashamed to say that I cry like a baby every time I watch it.

Comparisons with Bierce's...

Jacob's Ladder is a Great Psychological Thriller (Bluray update)
Jacob's Ladder is a psychological thriller in which Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins), a Vietnam veteran, is suffering from hallucinations which seem to have some connection with what happened to him one night in Vietnam war. Jacob finds himself living in different time realities and he just cannot grab at the present time. He sees demons and nightmarish visions strangely combined with flashbacks of that night in Vietnam which make him pass out. When he regains conciousness, he wakes up to completely a different time reality which, too, turns out to be a false at the end, leading him to another false reality. He cannot make sense of the situation and thinks he is losing his mind. He constantly finds himself trapped in neverending sequences of nightmares that he cannot wake up from. This cycle never ends until the end of the film when all the other realities vanish, leaving out only one reality which makes Jacob's Ladder a brilliant movie. Jacob's physician Louis probably express...

***** DANTE'S INFERNO *****
Jacob's Ladder open's with New York postal worker Jacob Singer waking on a subway train having just experienced a nightmare flashback to his time in Vietnam. Upset and confused he tries to ask his fellow passengers if he has missed his stop but as he passes them he sees flashes of tails and horns in the uncommunicative people whom he approaches for help. Exiting the train he finds the stairs to the subway locked and on crossing the tracks he narrowly misses being hit by a train coming in the other direction and whilst lying on the track he witnesses yet more disturbing images as the train passes by. Unsure whether these images are real or as a result of some form of post traumatic stress disorder from his time in `Nam, he struggles to keep his grip on sanity as his life becomes a nightmare, with his days punctuated by visions of demons, his first wife and his dead son. His life begins to unravel and the line between reality and delusion becomes ever more fragile.

This is, in my...

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