this movie is very complex and open to imterpretation. a real mind bender!
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while i agree that the main point is jacob wrestling his deamons before realising he is dead and then going to heaven, it is a shame that the whole idea about LSD type mind experiemnts just get lost as a sub plot!
i think it would be great as a main plot for a movie to address.
I never thought it was a subplot. I always figured that he was still at least residually under the influence of the drug while he was going in and out of consciousness, which was why his dreams were so fucked up.
The wild thing about this movie is that it's supposedly based on US Army tests of a hallucinogenic agent called BZ (not to be confused with BZP).
It was related to the tropane/belladonna alkaloids and was intended to be sprayed in a mist over targets to incapacitate them through intense hallucinations and delerium that could last for days.
It's not a film that is open to interptretation, it is spelled out for you right at the ending. He is laying there dying and his death trip is a BZ inspired hallicinogenic journey into what his future would be like had he lived.
They threw a hand grenade of bz in vietnam. accpording to this film, bz was on everything the soldiers ate and is what gave them heroin. The bz precursor quinuclinidol, is a tiny electrical spark that connects the brain to the body, the toad drug as BZ a nerve agent/body electricity drug. Its a shame that the idiots that made this movie...probably off on the bz stockpile and 2,000 lb cluster bomb filled with it etc gave the quinines such a bad name, especially as they involve a brain cell firing. There are quinines that affect the pineal/dopamine/pitutiary glands, endplates etc many more. it also caused many people to mine stupid shit in the muscaric receptors (in some cases causing rape), gave the fly agaric a bad name, just what mkultra tried to do with LSD. fuck this shit movie