The Life Before Her Eyes

Okay, this post is going to include movie spoilers, so if you hate them and would like to watch the movie on your own first, then don't read the rest of this.

So, I decided I wanted to watch a movie this morning, opened up netflix and a movie they recommended was "the life before her eyes". It's a movie about a school shooting, perhaps I watched it a little too soon to the Tuscon events, but I cried my eyes out. I hate the idea of shootings. That all of these innocent people just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can't understand it. I don't know how any person has it in them to hurt another.

Okay so this movie is being shot back and forth between a teenage girl, and that girl as an adult. It's not as confusing like some of the movies with shot like this can be. You are well aware that it is the same girl and they are going back and forth between her life then and her life now.

It was a variety of different important events for the girl, and her learning experience. A quote that I feel needs to be brought up, "Conscience is the voice of God in the nature and heart of man." was delivered by a "professor" in the film. It is a quote that I truly believe in, and I believe the girl does as well. She is also very inspired by the her science teacher informing her, "And if there's anything I want you guys to take with you from this class, as you're abusing your bodies over break, is three things: the heart is the body's strongest muscle, that the brain has more cells in it than our galaxy has stars, and that the body is 72% water. So wherever you go over vacation, don't get too dehydrated.".

The main character during her teen years struggles a lot with her life. She passes through some very difficult situations, perhaps one falling in love with an older boy, who she has sex with. She becomes offended by the word slut and her best friend asks her if she is so offended by the term why does she does what she does? She explains that it was a choice made out of love, from her heart. She becomes pregnant and loses the baby, and ends up leaving the boy. I guess, she questions a lot. She struggles with believing the heart is the strongest muscle in the body, because hers hurts so badly from her loses. Also, her best friend if highly religious and a very good friend to her and she questions why she deserves such a good person in her life.

The main character during her adult life, raises her daughter with the professor she seen speak in her youth. She is a teacher, and she's trying to get through the 15 year anniversary of the school shooting. As she does many of the things through her daily life, she remembers bits and pieces of her past. Her daughter is becoming difficult. She finds her husband with another woman. She decides to visit the scene of the shooting with flowers.

At the end of the film, it ties the whole thing together. As she is walking to school as a teenager, she stops at a graveyard for children who haven't made it, there she stops at the post for her unborn child, Emma. This is the name of the child she has as an adult. As she is walking into the school as an adult, a student asks if she is a survivor and she should sit at a specific spot. She exclaims no and walks into the school to place flowers around. They replay the shooting scene, and the shooter asks them who will die. Originally Maureen said he should shoot her. As the scene passes, the main character tells him to shoot her, replaying the quote, "Conscience is the voice of God in the nature and heart of man". The idea here is that the teenage life was what she had already experienced, and the adult life would have been what she imagined would have been so. Right before the shooter killed her. That's what she experienced. The idea is caught with the title, being that people say when you die, your life flashes before your eyes.

Thought the movie was put together very well, especially for an independent film. Definite recommendation. I cried, a lot, which is not common with me and movies. I guess, it was just easy to make it real with the fact that this is what could really happen in one of these tragedies.