saw vi

The saw franchise seems to have disappeared right up its own fundament.

The problem is that over the series it's tried to develop a story, but in each film it also tries to have a twist. This stems back to the first film, where at the end it's revealed one of the people in it isn't quite what you thought he was (avoiding spoilers).

The problem with the first twist is it wasn't really that good a twist. It's actually hard to really call it a twist - it was more like a surprise than a twist. But the presence of this surprise seems to have led the makers to put in one or more twists in all the subsequent films.

But each film is actually a proper sequel, supposedly revealing more about Jigsaw and the saw world, so by this film we've ended up with a back story that's so convoluted it's gone beyond confusing. I mean, it's even gotten to the stage that Jigsaw almost doesn't appear in the films - he's certainly not the man directly responsible for a lot of the traps.

It also seems to have lost site of what the traps are supposed to be about. They're supposed to be trials where people's will to live is tested and thereby they become reformed - learning to treasure life because they see it's true value. In later films they seem to become more about pitching people against each other.

There's much more of a strand of people deciding each other's fates, rather than their own. And many of the traps seem unfair - they're either escapable or, like I say, pitching two people against each other with the outcome that one of them must die due to the others actions. In earlier films it seemed more like the weight of responsibility was on your own choices affecting yourself, rather than other people.

But as I say, the real problem is that the back-story has gotten so convoluted and complicated that unless you're a really big fan or you happen to have watched the earlier films recently, you don't really know what's going on. Certainly I've been getting rather confused by it all.

What makes this all rather understandable is that in the commentary for one of the films it's revealed that actually there wasn't any sort of a grand plan. Instead, they write the films as they come and either leave open bits for other films to pick up and do with what they want or they try to take a different view-point on something that's already happened in order to generate their twist and to layer the films in together.

You can therefore see how things have gotten so complicated - without that overall plan, they've written themselves into a bit of a muddle.