Warrior

okay, i meant to write this review like three days ago but i ended up rewatching it again and ending up really enjoying it for a second time, overall it was a visually stunning movie that i think really did deserve it's flowers - an emotionally charged story about an estranged family that doesn't get their happy ending is absolutely as gut wrenching as it sounds. at the start of the movie we see paddy conlon listen to an audiobook of moby dick, this is an interesting juxtaposition to his faith in god, it's widely believed that moby dick is a metaphor for christianity. the novel often ties in themes of religious superstition with religious hypocrisy and satirisation - which ends up tying itself into paddy's arc as a whole, his determination to stay sober only to break his 1,000+ day soberness because of the rejection of tommy, someone he tried to reconcile with continuously before turning hypocritical and going on a binge, disregarding his faith and regressing. for paddy, the forgiveness of god pails in comparison to the forgiveness of his sons, both brendan and tommy. we can immediately see how when tommy shows up on paddy's doorstep that he's sort of morphed into what his father used to be, a drunk, belligerent, aggressive man. while not physically aggressive, we can see how tommy doesn't hold back when giving his father a piece of his mind, it's the resentment that's been building up for years at his absence. he brings up the death of his mother, not because he wanted to, but because he needed a reaction from his father to know that he'd truly changed, to know he cared, but there was no reaction which understandably makes tommy bristle. something that immediately stood out to me while watching it for the first time was how the lighting and coloring shifted so significantly between the tommy and brendan scenes - tommy's scenes are always gritty with dark ambient light, while brendan was always surrounded by bright colors and warm light. whether this was intentional or not, it's a visual reminder that these two men are the literal polar opposite to each other. brendan has a family, he made a life for himself, one where he can surrounded by his girls' laughter all the time, while tommy almost consistently stunts himself to be stuck in a dreary unescapable place. which also is painfully obvious in the training montage scene. let me get back on my bullshit because there were a handful of things i WISH we got more context/content of; tommy's military career, tommy's pill addiction, tommy's relationship with manny, i hate to say it but tommy's story felt a little underdeveloped, maybe it's younger brother/youngest child syndrome but tommy needed more attention during the movie to truly understand his motives. yes, you could argue that it adds to tommy's mysterious intrigue but either way I NEEDED TO KNOW MORE brendan going back into mma is a pivotal point in his life and relationship OBVIOUSLY but watching him train to beethoven kinda puts his mindset into perspective, he trains based on the classic techniques vs tommy who's a one punch and done guy, everything in this movie highlights the difference between the brothers, like how open brendan is to reconcile with his father to get tommy back but tommy clearly just resents everyone in his old family because they abandoned him and his mother in their mind. in regards to the final fight, i think that it was bittersweet, brandan deserved the whole thing, he needed the money he has a family, but i will say that seeing tommy realise that he let manny and his family down is a heart wrenching kind of evil because he tries to keep fighting - with a ripped shoulder, he keeps fighting, and it's devastating because we see paddy watch the second half of the fight, seeing that he will never be able to be a father to these two boys ever, and that they don't need them, they both have lives, they're both fighting, they're both on their feet. it's such a sickening sight. the fact that tommy most likely got arrested after the final kills me, he never really got to properly reconcile with brendan before or after the fight, in the last scene where brendans walking off with tommy with his arm around him really jus shows that deep down brendan just wants to be a big brother to tommy because in that moment, where tommy is in physical and emotional pain, thats's exactly who tommy needed. this shit was so beautiful lowkey cried but remember folks; it's never lupus