Tuesday, November 15, 2011

My sister's keeper

Movie Review #1: My Sister's Keeper

Official movie trailor:

"Most babies are accidents. Not me. I was engineered. Born to save my sister's life."

This line by Anna, the narrator of this movie, simply summarizes what this movie is all about. Anna is a younger sister of Kate, who was born to cure diseases of Kate by implanting all kinds of her organs to Kate's body whenever needed. Kate innately had terrible health, slowly dying from leukemia. She often choked up with blood, and was often suffering from medication treatments. I was even worried that her blood would soon be depleted as she was excreting too much blood from her body. Due to this, Anna received unwanted surgeries over ten times, by her age of 11.




At this age, she started to acknowledge what was happening to her and finally came to understand that their parents were violating her rights over her body. Not only that but her sister Kate also suddenly said she wants to stop all these. All the surgeries, chemical treatments, hurts and fights going on over her parents because of her.


Therefore, Anna finally chooses to file a law suit against her parents for violating her rights to make decisions over her body.
Later in this movie, the doctor feels that it would be better to just give up and make Kate comfortable until she dies. So her father and brother Jessie takes her to the beach, a place where Kate likes the most. However, her mom becomes nuts about this and wants her to get medication and keep on trying until she cures. Nonetheless, the family all just go down to the beach and enjoys the beautiful and pleasant ambience of the beach. When Kate comes back to the hospital where she had been staying almost all of her life, she receives a photobook, filled with photos she and her family took, all of them smiling.




That night, Kate and her mom cried themselves to sleep. And that night, Kate died.
Right after the movie ended, what came to mind was, life is so transient. I've been thinking about death a lot recently, and this movie seemed to just put all my scattered thoughts into order. You NEVER know what will happen just one second later, and your life just goes by.
I think the reason why human beings are so afriad of death is because they really don't know how they will feel or what will happen after they die. Humans have knowledge boundaries that are so wide and deep that it is impossible to become aware of all of them during lifetime. However, there are also plenty of things we do not know, like death. As everyone has to go through death and nobody knows what will happen, it is quite natural to be afraid of it. But, whatever happens in the future, I think going against nature is always wrong. Anna's birth, at the first place, which was also against the nature, was the start of all the conflicts and fights and pain. Of course, in terms of birth itself, it should be celebrated, but it certainly brought lots of anguish. Moreover, at the end of the movie, the mother keep on tries to continue the chemical medication, which hurts Kate so much, she wants to stop and give up. This, making a frantic last-ditch effort, did not work in the end, and it only brought fights and pain to everyone. Thus, I think we should never go against the nature of what will happen, especially if it is impossible to be controlled with human power.


Rating :