Jacob's Ladder (film)
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Jacob's Ladder is a 1990 thriller film directed by Adrian Lyne, based on a screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin.
Plot summary
The film opens on 6th October 1971. Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) is an American soldier in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Helicopters pass overhead, spraying a strange mist over the treetops. Without any warning, Jacob's unit is ambushed and the soldiers try to take cover, but the battalion begins to exhibit strange behavior for no apparent reason. Jacob tries to escape the unexplained insanity, only to be stabbed with a bayoneted rifle by an unseen enemy.
The film shifts between Vietnam, to Jacob's memories of his son Gabriel (Macaulay Culkin) and former wife Sarah, to his present relationship with a woman named Jezebel (Elizabeth Peña) in New York. During this time, Jacob faces several threats to his life and has several hallucinatory experiences. It is revealed that his son Gabriel was hit by a car and killed before Jacob went to Vietnam.
As the hallucinations become increasingly bizarre, Jacob learns about chemical experiments performed on U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. He is approached by a man named Michael Newman (Matt Craven), who claims to have been a chemist working with the Army's chemical warfare division in Saigon. His project worked on creating a drug that increased aggression in soldiers. Human tests of the drug (code-named "the ladder") were given to a group of Viet Cong POWs and later, to Jacob's unit. However, instead of targeting the enemy, the men in Jacob's battalion attacked each other.
Jacob's friend and chiropractor Louis (Danny Aiello) states the main thematic point of the film: in effect, hell is really purgatory, and those who are ready to let go of their lives do not find the experience 'hellish'.
We finally learn that Jacob never made it out of Vietnam; the entire series of experiences turns out to have been a dying hallucination. Jacob's experiences appear to have been a form of purgation in which he releases himself from his earthly attachments, finally joining his dead son Gabriel to ascend a staircase toward a bright light.
Because all of the movie's events take place in the span of a dying hallucination, the film's plot is considered a variation on Ambrose Bierce's 1886 short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which was made into a short film in 1961 and later popularized as a 1964 episode of the television show, The Twilight Zone.
At the end of the film, a message states that the U.S. Army allegedly experimented with a hallucinogenic drug called BZ, but the Pentagon denies it.
Tagline: The most frightening thing about Jacob Singer's nightmare is that he isn't dreaming.
Trivia
- It is suggested occasionally that Louis may actually be an angel; if so, it is ironic (and perhaps deliberate) that he is the only central character who does not have a Biblical name.
- Jacob's Ladder inspired certain concepts and themes in the survival horror video game series Silent Hill, according to an interview with the developers of the games.
- Jacob's son Gabe is played by an uncredited Macaulay Culkin.
- Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin initially wanted the demonic and angelic symbolism to be more representative of popular imagery - devils with pitchforks and angels with feathered wings. However, Adrian Lyne decided it would be far more interesting and frightening with more vague and menacing demonic figures.
- This film is the first to use the "fast-head" motion. The effect used to create the bizarre, twitching figures Jacob sees throughout the film have often been used in recent horror films, such as Stir of Echoes, The Ring, the remake of House on Haunted Hill, and an episode of the popular TV show Supernatural, as well as many monsters in the Silent Hill video game series.
- There are several scenes in the screenplay which did not make the final version on the film. Several of these are included in the DVD special edition.
- At the time of the printing of the screenplay for public sale, Rubin and Lyne had not yet decided on the exact way to end the film. They both had a different vision of the final conflict, and the original version of the film is the one included in the screenplay. A vast portion of the screenplay is not included in the final cut of the film.