A New Take on the Afterlife

               An age-old question that has been pondered about is what will heaven be like? Is it white pearly gates built upon clouds? Is it a joy that none of us can fathom? Or is it something else entirely? Maybe we just get reincarnated to try a different life, or maybe we just go back into our own life and start over again. No one really knows, although there are those who have gone through near death experiences that claim to have insights. The new film, Eternity, directed by David Freyne has a unique and fun take on the afterlife put through the lens of a rom-com.

               Eternity starts out with an old couple, Larry and Joan, and they are going to visit their kid for a gender reveal party to see the gender their grand child would be. Once there, Larry chokes on a pretzel and dies. When he wakes up, he is on a train, but he is now much younger and very confused as to how he ended up on the train. Once the train arrives at the station, him and others flood off the train, and Larry just keeps asking people what is going on.

               Eventually, he finds his after-life agent, and she tells him everything that is going on. So basically, the train takes them to a purgatory, and once there, a person gets to decide which heaven they want to go to for eternity, and once they choose their destination, they cannot change it. Some of the themes are beach vacation, mountain vacation, a rave, lqbtq, Paris, and many more, so basically, there is something for everyone.

               The problem is Larry is now dead, and his wife is still living, so if he goes to a heaven, he must hope that his wife chooses the same one, otherwise they are separate for eternity. It is possible to wait in purgatory for as long as needed to make a decision, but after a week, the person must start to work. So Larry decides to head to beach heaven and make sure everything is set up for when Joan comes, but as he is descending the escalator, he sees Joan.

               When he comes back up the escalator and finds her, he is not the only one that has found her. Joan had been married before, and Luke, who died in war, had been waiting over 60 years in purgatory to see her again. So now Joan is left with a choice to make: will she go and live eternity with the man she had kids with and built a life with, Larry, or will she take the chance to live the life she never had with Luke? Not to spoil it, but she does make a choice, and then another one, and then another one.

               The movie does ask an interesting question. If your first spouse died while you were still together and in love, and then you remarry and are happy, what happens when you get to heaven? Do you have to choose? Has a choice already been made? Is there 50/50 time split? Who knows! But the movie asks this question in a fun way by adding the twist that they must choose to live in one eternity forever.

               I do think this idea of the afterlife is interesting. When I think about heaven, I often think about it in a way such as this. Not necessarily that you go to a recruitment fair and must choose, but that heaven is what you want it to be. So to me, heaven would be a place with mountains, meadows, and waterfalls. Now there might be an IMAX movie theater there too with an endless film library.

The statement this movie makes is that if this is my heaven, but it is not the heaven that my family wants to be in, then I will not see them. They seem to say that family is nice, but if they want a different eternity, then the people you end up with will replace them, and you will still find joy without them, and as eternity progresses their memory will fade. I do not know if I agree with this ideology, it would be much preferable if they were in another heaven, and I could just mosey over and visit whenever I wanted, but this is a fictional scenario with hard and fast rules created as plot devices, so I do not know why I let it bother me so much.

This movie also made my stomach tie itself in knots by the constant reference to eternity and forever. Forever is an unfathomable concept, and if you think about only getting one life and then being gone forever with no restart. That makes my stomach churn. It does not matter if that forever is in the place I imagine or if it is in the worst conceivable place, forever sounds awful. Like everything just keeps going and going and going and there is no end? Even if there is an end, then it is the end forever. Ah it makes me sick just writing it. This took me out of the movie at the beginning because I could not stop thinking about it, but eventually I found my way back into the story.

For most of the movie, I thought that it was very good. I was thinking it was going to be 3.5 stars, then we got to the last 30 minutes, and these felt like an eternity. First, Joan decides that the decision is too hard altogether, and that she is going to go to Paris heaven with her neighbor. Then Larry convinces her that she should go to heaven with Luke, because that was when she was happiest, so she does. After being there for a little bit, she decides that mountain heaven with Luke is not where she wants to be, so she breaks the rules and goes back for Larry. Once they escape, they choose to go to plain heaven, where they live in a suburb just like the one, they had been living in before they died.

So is the message that heaven should just be the life that you live? If so, this is certainly a good message for some people. The grass is not always greener on the other side. Living on beach vacation for eternity probably would get boring. For some though, living their current life would not be heaven. Maybe the movie was trying to say that heaven should be about the people you are with so your family and loved ones, although being stuck in an endless suburb sounds like hell too, so who knows.

Overall, this was a good movie, but it was at its strongest in its first two acts. There was world building, there was love, and there was competition, but by the end it felt like the director did not know how they wanted to end it. When she chose Luke, I thought it was over. I thought it was the wrong choice, but I thought that it was not a big deal. Then it just kept going and going. If they had been decisive, I feel like the film would have felt stronger and less drawn out. So instead of 3.5 stars, this gets 3 stars.