Aftermath

This film is based on a true story. The name, Aftermath, refers to the impact an extremely traumatic incident had on the lives of two people. The event in question was an aviation accident, a mid-air collision between a passenger plane and a cargo plane. There were no survivors.The first of these two people is Roman (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a Russian construction worker. His wife, daughter and unborn grandchild were all victims of the crash.The second person is Jake (Scoot McNairy), an air traffic controller. He was the only controller on duty in the airport’s tower when the accident occurred.Following the accident, Roman is overcome with grief. He rejects any offers of help. Nor can he help himself. Thus, for example, instead of letting go of the past by throwing out any remaining mementos of his family, he feeds his grief by sticking photographs of his wife and daughter on the walls of his living room, staring at them for hours on end.Jake, on the other hand, has different issues to deal with. His mental health is also severely affected by the crash. However, he struggles with feelings of guilt. His mental state is further damaged by the spectre of an impending investigation, the witch hunt that will inevitably follow. During the trial, his handling of that night’s events will be under intense and meticulous scrutiny. If deemed responsible for the accident, what retribution will be exacted by the authorities? The merciless, lynch-mob mentality of the US also rears its monstrous head: the exterior of Jake’s house is defaced with slogans such as “Murderer” and “Killer”. Jake fears for his life. The psychiatric treatment Jake receives is worse than useless. He attempts suicide.Some reviewers of this film suggest that its main theme is an exploration of grief. I concur. However, the one griever that is not mentioned is the viewer. In this case, myself. And it is true that by the end of the film I felt a great sense of grief. I felt grief for both Roman and Jake. I also felt grief for the current state of the world, a state which this film so accurately depicts.This film depicts a world in which people are frightened, isolated and alone. It depicts a world in which people prey on each other, in which the powerful prey on the weak. It depicts a world in which everyone has questions, but for which no one has answers. It depicts a world in which there is no succour. It depicts a world of appalling sadness. In short, this film depicts a world bereft of hope.Take, for example, my response to the events in the control tower on the night of the crash. I refer in particular to the use of technology. Jake is alone in the tower. A plane has been diverted to his airport from Pittsburgh. Jake is told to contact Pittsburgh and give them the “heads up”. However, the telephones are not working. His repeated, urgent attempts to contact Pittsburgh take him away from his station, and thus the crash becomes an “accident waiting to happen”.So, technology. People have been forced to become slaves to technology. I was forced to become a slave to technology before the end of my working life. When I first started a decades-long career as a teacher, there were no computers in classrooms, or in the school office. Now they are in every classroom and in every office. Like those endlessly spawning monsters in video games, the older technology spawns the new. Now it is not only computers that are found in every classroom. Electronic whiteboards have replaced blackboards. The whiteboards are connected to the computer by yet more technology: digital projectors. And on and on and on it goes. And these monsters made my working life a living hell.They made my life hell in many ways. Not least of these was the treadmill of relentless catching up, the unremitting slog of learning how to operate each newly introduced technology. And I am not shy of technology, therefore this was never the problem. The problem was, and still is, that digital technology is extremely difficult to use. It is very demanding. It is counter intuitive. The human user must always adapt to the technology, never the other way around. Therefore, its prolonged use reduces the vastly more sophisticated human mind to working at the level of a mere machine. In short, just as a physical dependence on, say, crutches, would weaken/damage one’s legs, dependence on technology damages the mind. Thus, to force technology on workers, or on pupils, is an extreme cruelty.In addition to the foregoing, while I dreaded the introduction of more technology, the arrival of more technology delighted my employers and my bosses. It offered them endless opportunities to overburden me with extra work e.g. with many hours of unpaid overtime. Not only did this extra work include computerising tasks that had formerly been done much more effectively and efficiently by hand, but it also included dealing with failing technology. And digital technology is extremely unreliable. It is extremely temperamental. It develops faults at the drop of a hat. Unsurprisingly, therefore, unreliable technology was also a problem for Jake in the film. Indeed, it was a contributing factor to the accident.Just as Jake’s attention was diverted from where it should have been by faulty technology, that was also a consequence for me. In the classroom, during lessons, when my attention should have been focused on the pupils, on communicating with them, on watching their faces and their body language for their reactions to what they were being taught, it was focused instead on using the technology and on keeping it working. However, even though my ability to do my job was being seriously degraded by the use of technology, I was nonetheless held responsible for the continuing progress of my pupils. Worse, not only was I still held responsible for maintaining existing standards, but I was also held responsible for meeting the ever more exacting standards imposed on me by my employers.There can be few jobs left which are not ruled by technology. Hospital staff, for example, are also ruled by technology. This I was not surprised to learn during a recent and protracted stay in hospital. Nurses, I was to discover, spend the vast majority of their time servicing technology, instead of attending to their patients. For example, instead of monitoring patients on their drips, nurses scurried around the wards servicing the technology which administered these drips to the patients. These machines were always failing. I was on an intravenous drip for most of each night. When attached to the drip machine, I dared not move. The slightest movement caused the machine to stop. It would then utter a continuous string of high pitched, sleep defying, warning bleeps. Sometimes it took nearly an hour before a nurse appeared to switch off the alarm and restart the machine. The machine would stop and be re-started repeatedly over the course of the night. Therefore, a process which should have taken less than an hour, could take two or even three hours to conclude. And since several drips were prescribed for me each night, I was never off that machine. I hardly slept. I became even more exhausted than when I had arrived in hospital. In modern hospitals, the technology is nursed before the patient.It is said that the current pandemic is threatening to overwhelm the NHS. Too late. The NHS has already been overwhelmed. It has been overwhelmed by technology. The Titanic is already sinking.Next, my reaction to Jake’s boss:During Jake’s meetings with his boss (often accompanied by lawyers), his boss repeatedly told Jake: “We are thinking of you, Jake”. In other words, this boss was claiming to have Jake’s best interests, his welfare, at heart.“She doth protest too much, methinks”, is a well-known quote from Shakespeare’s play, “Hamlet”. It was Gertrude’s (Hamlet’s mother’s) response to one of the characters she saw in a play staged by her son. In the play, this character, also a queen, was making much of her fidelity and feelings of love towards her on-stage husband. However, these declarations of love were too excessive to be believed. It was natural, therefore, for Gertrude to question their sincerity.The point I am making here is not that Shakespeare was more than usually insightful about human nature. (Actually, as his plays reveal, his understanding of human nature was not above the ordinary. Far from it.) No. The point I am making is that in Shakespeare’s day, people KNEW that excessive declarations of love (or any other emotion or opinion) were insincere. They KNEW that such declarations were lies. This wisdom has long since been forgotten.Meanwhile, like the character in the “play within a play”, Jake’s boss was also overacting. Bosses do it all the time. They make great play of having the best interests of their employees at heart. And, increasingly, they get away with these lies. Anyone who believes that employers have their employees’ best interests at heart is either naïve, stupid or brown-nosing for promotion.My employers had little consideration for my wellbeing. As mentioned earlier, they forced me to become a slave to technology, and used technology to make my working life more difficult, more unrewarding and more stressful. They sweated blood out of me. But it didn’t stop there. In one school where I taught, as with the technology, the old school building was replaced by a new building that was far more difficult to use. In truth, the school’s architect was more interested in garnering awards for his work than he was in providing people with a functioning building. Specifically, this architectural “wonder” had many open-plan working areas. I worked in one of these areas for many years. Not only did this space accommodate several noisy classrooms, but it had extremely high ceilings. The space was cavernous. The acoustics were appalling. There being no walls to reflect one’s voice back to where it was needed, one’s words disappeared, unheard, into the heights. Quite literally, I could not hear myself speak. This in itself was most disconcerting.Health issues relating to the voice are common among teachers. Teachers are, after all, engaged in a form of strenuous public speaking for many hours each day. However, until then, I had never had any problems with my voice. Indeed, I had always been told that my voice projection was excellent. Yet after only a few years working in open plan, my voice began to show the strain. I devised various ways of reducing the use of my voice. None of them were effective. My voice became weaker and weaker. It became extremely painful to talk. I was in continuous pain, night and day. I went to the doctor. I was referred to a consultant, to a speech therapist. No one had any answers. My condition got worse.When I went to my boss to explain the situation, he decided to call a meeting. A few other interested colleagues were also invited to attend. However, so concerned was my boss for my welfare, that he forgot all about the meeting. We waited and waited for him to appear until finally someone went to fetch him. Still, he did not come to the meeting. When found, my boss merely waved his arms unconcernedly in the air and told us to sort the matter out by ourselves. But how could we sort it out? For example, any action that I might have wanted to take would have involved money for which we would need his approval.And still my boss continued to do nothing. After having subjected me to a whole year of this torture, he suddenly decided that a new wall was going to be built. However, this wall would only divide the large open plan area into two smaller areas. He had not solved the problems that open plan creates, nor had he the least intention of doing so, he had merely alleviated them. Even so, my health slowly improved. My voice slowly healed. This improvement was not solely down to my boss’ belated actions. It was also due to my decision, a risky one for a teacher, to continue to do as little talking in the classroom as possible, that policy decision remaining in effect until I resigned. In short, I had decided that I would no longer suffer the abuse meted out to me by my boss/employers.(As an aside, I believe my boss would have acted more quickly had I put him under more pressure. I should have taken as much time off work, taken as many “sickies”, as I could get away with. However, to my lasting regret, I did not. Colleagues also were less than helpful. They, too frightened and two-faced, declared their liking for open plan. However, when a new boss eventually replaced the old, money for extensive repairs/improvements magically appeared. Teachers were invited to bid for some of this money. And those same colleagues who, only a few years before, had failed to support me, had told me that they liked open plan, submitted bids for new walls. Every bid was approved. All the open plan areas vanished.By providing money for improvements, it might be supposed that this new boss was better than the boss he replaced. Suppose again. He was worse. He turned out to be the sort of person that parents used to routinely warn their children about, namely, the stranger who offers you sweeties to tempt you into his car. Like those strangers, this boss offered us “candy”, sweeteners, to make him look better, to get us on his side, to make it easy for him to manipulate and control us. And it worked. One colleague admitted to me that she liked doing extra work for this man, even if it was unpaid. The reason? He made her feel good about it.Of course, politicians play this game all the time, this game of making themselves look good. However, there is not one iota of sincerity behind their actions.Business plays the same game. In the 60s, everybody knew that business was corrupt, was out to rob you blind. Business responded by going ethical and charitable, pretending to be concerned about poverty and the environment. So, for example, some supermarkets give money to the poor of Africa. Where do they get that money? By pushing up the prices of their own goods so that the poor of this country suffer more. But note, the point here is that they are not giving up their own profits to make these donations. Their charity comes out of the pockets of their customers or else it gains them tax concessions.)Returning to the subject of working in open plan: even working in a smaller open plan area still meant that I had to suffer all the stresses working in such an unsuitable environment creates. One reason my bosses liked open plan was that it gave them an opportunity to spy on their staff. (My bosses, of course, did not work in open plan offices. Their workspaces had four walls and a door.) In open plan, you never knew when the boss would suddenly appear by your desk. Or the school informer, for that matter. Even if they did not enter the classroom, they were routinely on patrol, peering in at you as they passed. Even though one was doing nothing wrong, under such relentless scrutiny, one felt guilty nonetheless.With respect to the games Jake’s boss and mine were playing, this sort of behaviour is increasingly common today. I have instanced business and politicians. Indeed, extremely able practitioners of the art of propaganda, such as Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler, are able to create cult followings whose adherents are willing to die on their command. (I refer here to the extremely disturbing events in Washington last week.) However, speaking as someone who has been to both Tibet as well as to Tibetan monasteries in the UK, I have observed that Tibetan monks also play this game. Unlike business and politicians, their artifice is to present themselves to the world as being childlike and innocent.Tibetan monks typically wear open, smiling facial expressions filled with wide-eyed wonder. They giggle childishly. Fooled by this, western onlookers smile at them in the same way as I have seen adults smile at the children, the younger ones especially, as they leave school at lunchtime or the end of the day.The monks’ “charm”, as I have said, is a ruse. In Tibet, it allowed the monks to take great liberties with foreigners, to be abusive towards them. For example, at our single storey, motel-like hotel, the monks liked nothing better than to play peeping-Tom. One might be sitting on the toilet or standing, naked, at the washbasin, only to look up and see a monk’s face peering in at the window. While the windows in the toilet had no curtains, there were curtains in the bedroom itself. The monks got round this inconvenience by, unannounced, opening the door of one’s room to scrutinise us and our belongings. When one met monks in the street, they would approach us and stroke our bare arms, commenting on how hairy we were compared to them. In one of the temples, a monk went so far as to “touch me up”. In other words, he stuck his hand between my legs and tried to fondle me. This behaviour cannot be attributed to cultural differences between east and west. As I have said, the monks were being abusive, and that is extremely bad behaviour, no matter what part of the world you come from. So, when I see that “charm”, that charm in the lowest all the way to the top of that religious hierarchy, I know that it hides all manner of appalling behaviour.I have discussed my response to the film with respect to technology and to the cruel games bosses and other people play. Finally, my response to the mental health issues raised by the film. I will concentrate on Jake.He was alone, isolated, frightened. The psychiatric treatment he received (on the basis that he was prescribed drugs, I think he received psychiatric rather than psychological treatment) was worse than useless. Although I have never been treated for mental health problems myself, I have a great deal of experience of mental health through my job, through friends and through a close relative. My close relative found his treatment to be worse than useless.Of course, one has to ask why mental health treatments are worse than useless – and you only have to look at the escalation of mental health problems in the population to know this. The reason is that, by their own admission, scientists do not understand how the mind works. Scientists simply do not know what a healthy mind looks like. And, in the total absence of any understanding whatsoever, in the total absence of knowing what a healthy mind should look like, how can any treatment ever be said to be effective? For example, while psychiatrists think of the mind as a sort of chemical machine and treat health problems with drugs, psychologists prefer to treat a person’s behaviours and thoughts, attempting to change those behaviours and thoughts to those deemed more suitable. Yet, despite not understanding how the mind works, mental health practitioners are nonetheless prepared to tinker with it, prescribe drugs or alter thoughts and behaviours, while making sweeping assumptions about the efficacy of their treatments. To put it mildly, they are playing a very, very dangerous game.So, to conclude, I have discussed my main responses to the film. I have explained why this film has so accurately depicted the state of the modern world. As to the story, it was a slow-moving drama, true, and I know that is not to everyone’s taste. But for me, the slower pace enhanced the effect of hopelessness. Gave it a feeling of authenticity.I’m giving the film 5 stars.

I am not sure how I feel about this film. Firstly, Arnie was brilliant, and I think it was his best performance, he really did show his acting skills in this. I am an Arnie fan. I think with his films it is best not to take everything to seriously and just relax into it. If you get to serious about his ability in his early films you can ruin the enjoyment of watching them. He certainly doesn't take himself too seriously in most of his work. This film is a different kettle of fish though. His portrayal of grief is bang on I think, as one reviewer who had a similar experience attested. I feel great sympathy for that reviewer, listed as Amazon Customer, and think it was a very valuable review, bravely given.The reason I am not sure about the film itself though is that it doesn't feel right using a real story as the basis for a film which diverges quite a lot from the truth. We are advised that this is based on a true story, which it is. There are a whole heap of differences though. The accident really happened over Germany,there were 71 victims not 271, Kayolev lost a wife and 2 children (again different than the film) etc. I think if the film had been more about what actually happened rather than just used for the idea of it, and to tell what actually happened rather than just for entertainment it would sit better with me. Maybe I'm overthinking it but It feels disrespectful to the victims and their families just to use bits of it like this.If you are an Arnie fan (or even if you are not) this is a real showcase for his developed talent. It really is well worth a watch.

It's not the greatest movie ever. And it's somewhat similar to Fear X, a much better film. I'd give it 3 and a half stars if I could. But It's definitely worth a watch if you're interested.Aftermath hits you with the overwhelming, crushing, and devistating realities of grief and guilt that most movies gloss over. It's pretty powerful, The film is almost totally devoid of humour or happiness. It's not a fun watch. And some people will find it's joyless tone either too oppressive or just uninvolving. But for me it worked. I liked seeing something that felt honest about how brutal and unfair life can feel at times.The film is well shot and edited.The direction is solid, with many smart, subtle little touches that show that real thought was put into the making of this film. I could see the director going on to make really good films.The acting is good all around. Schwarzenegger handles being in a drama well. Maybe it's just because I've always thought he was a much better actor than most people give him credit for, but I don't think it was a remarkable performance. Good. But nothing special. He's not the best actor in this movie. Scoot McNairy easily outshines him.as the guilt-ridden man Arny blames for the death of his family.But It is definaly One of Arnold's best dramatic performances.The film's biggest weak point is the script. It's not bad. But it's unadventurous and simple.Their are no lines or scenes that really stand out or hit home. And it really needed to be a lot smarter to give the film staying power. Aftermath is powerful. But it probably won't stay with you for long.All in all it's a solid, well made film that gains a lot of points with me for daring to show that sometimes things don't get better. that pain can't just be washed away with a hug and smile. Some things don't stop hurting.It might not be that smart. But it's a raw and effecting film.Give it a watch if you this sounds like what you want out of a movie. Or just want to see a bit more of good ol' Arnold!

Gripping thriller with Schwarzenegger, not his usual role but played very well. Kind of film that you cannot work out what is going to happen next right to the end.