Seven Movie Review

Two seniors from Ave Maria University, Garrett Hallinan and David Adamaitis, host a podcast where they review movies. Their first episode is about the movie Seven, a murder mystery thriller that explores the seven deadly sins. They discuss the sins of gluttony, sloth, and pride in detail, highlighting how they are portrayed in the movie. They also mention the importance of being intentional to avoid sloth and the connection between pride and other sins. They briefly touch on other elements of the movie, such as the constant rain in the city. Hey guys, what's up? Thank you so much for tuning in to the Fishers of Men podcast. This is our first podcast. My name is Garrett Hallinan, and I'm a senior at Ave Maria University, and my co-host is... Hi there, I'm David Adamaitis, also a senior here with Garrett, and we're just so excited to bring to you this podcast, our whole purpose of which is to do a movie review. Just recently, Garrett and I watched a super interesting movie called Seven, which is about the seven deadly sins. It was produced in 1995 by David Fincher, and it is a murder mystery thriller. So before we dive into a little bit more of the content, Garrett, how about you give us a little overview of what the film is about? Yeah, absolutely. So guys, here's an online synopsis for the movie. I don't want you to think that I actually wrote this, but here we go. One retiring police detective, William Somerset, played by Morgan Freeman, tackles a final case with the aid of newly transferred David Mills, played by Brad Pitt. They discover a number of elaborate and grisly murders. They soon realize they are dealing with a serial killer, played by Kevin Spacey, who is targeting people he thinks represent one of the seven deadly sins. Somerset also befriends Mills' wife, Tracy, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, who is pregnant and afraid to raise her child in a crime-riddled city. Awesome, Garrett. Thanks so much for that summary of the movie. Before we move further into just some of the details of the movie, I think it's really important to talk about what sin is. There's this awesome paragraph in the Catechism of the Catholic Church which defines sin as a defense against reason, truth, and right conscience. It's a failure in genuine love for God and for a neighbor. So that's just an overview of what sin is in general, and this movie highlights the seven deadly sins, or you could call them the cardinal sins, meaning that all other sin actually comes from these sins. So these sins are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. So as we go forward, we just want to highlight a few of these to give you a taste about how this movie plays out with the crimes committed and how it relates to the sin. So we're going to highlight gluttony, sloth, and pride. So Garrett, would you mind taking us away and talking about gluttony? Yeah, absolutely. So gluttony is the overindulgence or lack of self-restraint in food, drink, or wealth items. And in the movie Seven, there's this extremely obese victim found dead in his apartment with his hands and legs tied, sitting in his own filth with his face in a bowl of spaghetti. Actor Kevin Spacey, who plays the killer named John Doe, has the intention of killing his victim in a way that resembles the victim's habits in everyday life. So to give a more clear description of this victim's life, he ate a lot of food, a lot of food, and he was severely obese. And that's all he did, he just ate and ate and ate. And John Doe recognized this. He knew this guy. And in his mind, he believed that he had this moral obligation to bring justice to people like this particular man, to this gluttonous man. Which might not sound so bad at first. It's good to help people out, obviously, correct their mistakes, and just help them in ways that you can. But unfortunately, Doe's reaction was quite grotesque, and he literally killed this man, which is not good. But gluttony was the cause of this. And Doe, he tied up his victim, he forced him to eat so much food until his stomach burst. What a tough way to die. This is obviously an extreme situation that hopefully never occurs in real life. However, it does demonstrate the seriousness of gluttony and how harmful it can be for people. Gluttony can be seen in various aspects of everyday life, not just as it pertains to food, but also our excessive use of technology and our alcohol consumption every day. Those just being two other prime examples. Whew, that was heavy. And that's just the first sin that we're talking about today. So David, now that we're through with gluttony, will you tell our audience a little bit about sloth? Wow. Thanks, Garrett. That is definitely very heavy. And it's definitely not getting any lighter as we go forward and talk about sloth now. So simply put, sloth is a desire for ease and reluctance to work. I think it's very interesting because you can see elements of sloth in all different parts of our lives. Maybe that's the easiest and simplest thing is hitting the snooze button when you wake up, or laying in bed after our alarm's gone off and not doing anything, just avoiding getting up and starting your day. Or maybe it's an unwillingness to step outside yourself and do uncomfortable things, such as working out or pushing yourself in a sport, or even avoiding the interactions with others or trying to make friends. At the end of the day, it's just simply could be the avoidance of using our God-given talents. Now looking at how this plays out in the movie, we see as our killer, John Doe, chooses his next victim, Victor. Victor is both a pedophile and a drug dealer who avoids honest hard work which requires effort. He chooses, you could say, the easy way out or a simple way that avoids those things. In his criminal activities through selling drugs, his drugs affect other people which creates a sloth in them. He abuses others, such as children, through their rape. So he's actually performing both physical and mental sloth. That physical is that abuse of children and the mental sloth is through the powers that drugs have over other people. I think it's interesting, as you can see, the punishment he receives. So John Doe comes and ties Victor to a bed, basically makes him immobile for an entire year. And over that course of the year, Doe inflicts punishments on him. Maybe that's little cuts across the body or more serious things like cutting off his tongue or a hand at different points. As the movie goes on, our two detectives, Somerset and Mills, come across Victor and are able to rescue him from the situation. However, Victor does die later in the hospital. But it's interesting to see how this is an example of poetic justice that John Doe inflicts a punishment that corresponds to the crime committed by Victor. Dave, that's crazy, man. I mean, it's a tough sin. And I'm just curious, and for our audience members too, how can people stay away from this sin? What's a good way to stay away from sloth? Definitely. Great question here. I really think the key to avoiding sloth is a certain level of intentionality. We have to be very intentional. What we do, how do we spend our time? And going back to that idea of our God-given talents, we've been blessed with so many attributes in our lives that we just have to take advantage of everything we have. And again, just be intentional with that. So we've looked at gluttony and we've looked at sloth. So I'm going to send it back to you, Garrett, and if you could talk about pride, which is a third of the three deadly sins we're going to talk about. And then we'll go on to different elements of the movie. Yes. So pride is an excessive belief in one's own stability that interferes with the individual's recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. So this is a big deal, pride. This is crazy stuff. So John Doe, who we know is the murderer in this film, made things interesting this time. He actually gave the victim a choice for once. But before we go into that specific choice, let's talk about this woman, this specific victim of John Doe's. She was very beautiful. She was gorgeous. She was a model. And she had pictures of herself all over her bedroom, which is weird. It's really weird. She had a big ego. So there's that pride being demonstrated there of her realizing that she's beautiful, but rather than just kind of internalizing that and appreciating her beauty, she feels that need and that desire to express it in a way that's not good. So now back to that choice that I was talking about that Doe gave the woman. So Doe, typical Doe, mutilated this woman's face, but he gave her the choice to either call for help and live with her mutilated face or to take sleeping pills, which would ultimately kill her. Now what the woman ended up doing was she took the pills and she did not want to bear that cross. She didn't want to have to live with her mutilated face because she was so used to being so beautiful and she couldn't imagine herself living in that way and not having that beauty. So as mentioned before, pride is the sin from which all others arise. Gluttony and sloth are merely two of those sins. And people who succumb to these sins, or any sin for that matter, it's pride that they hit first and then those sins come after. And I want to share with you guys this idea from Genesis to hopefully paint this picture more clearly as to what pride really is. And so this idea goes, I'm going to do things my way instead of God's way. I'm not going to submit to God. I'm going to be like God. Like I know good and evil. That's pride. Awesome. So we've looked at the three different sins. That is pride, gluttony, and sloth. And like I said, those are just the three of the seven deadly sins. And this is obviously a main part of what the movie is all about. Like we've seen is John Doe inflicting punishment on pain on these victims that he thinks embodies these crimes and sins. But obviously in any movie or any story, maybe that's a book too, there's little details. And these little details add a lot of depth and weight to what happens within a story. So now we're just going to transition from this main plot into looking at some of those smaller elements. So Garrett, do you want to take it away with a couple of those? Absolutely. So in the movie, there are two things really that these two main points here that I'm going to hit. It's always raining in the city, and you'll see it from clip to clip. It's always raining. It's very depressing. And it's also a very dirty city. So we're just going to focus on those two things. It's always raining, and it's a dirty city. Many of you, I'm sure, have heard this song. It's called Rain, Rain, Go Away. And I just want to share with you this song just to kind of paint, again, paint the picture. I'm a very visual person, so I'd like to just kind of share with you this little visual. So the song goes, Rain, rain, go away. Come again some other day. We want to go outside and play. Come again some other day. And you're probably asking yourselves, why is Garrett mentioning this song right now? This seems trivial. But this is important. And the reason why I bring up this song is because it's a contrast, or excuse me, it is a good comparison to this city life. There's this rain, this dirtiness of the city that's constantly preventing people from enjoying that city life. And you'll see in the movie, people are always just moving so fast. Everything is just so rushed. And I think that's a good demonstration for society today as well. I'm not going to go down a rabbit hole here, but we see that in cities. This rush and this constant worry and this pressure that we inflict upon ourselves. And a city that might give you a better visual aid to just kind of understand what I'm getting at here is that of Gotham City in Batman. That was actually filmed in the city of Pittsburgh and a couple of other cities too throughout the United States. And I think that that kind of just really relates to the setting in Seven and just the overall feel. And even just as a watcher, obviously we're not in that city. We're not actually there in that setting, but we get to really feel and experience it by watching the screen. And so those are just a couple of different elements I want to share with you guys. Again, it's always raining and it's a dirty city. That's why Dave and I live in Southwest Florida. It's sunny here and we love it. But we love the movie Seven too. So those are just a couple of elements of the movie. And now we're going to examine the two main protagonists in this movie. So that way you guys can get a good idea as to what the characters are like. So Dave, can you tell them about Somerset and Mills? Definitely. So we have our two protagonists, Somerset, who's played by Morgan Freeman, and Mills, who is played by Brad Pitt. And these two are detectives that work together on the case of John Doe. Now Somerset is portrayed as the old, wise detective. He's been in the job for his whole life. And actually he's looking to retire within a week in the setting of this movie. And you have Mills, who's young and ambitious, full of heart and emotion. And he's coming on to the job and he's working in partnership with Somerset. And he's just come off some major accomplishments. But they both have different reactions and outlooks to this case. Somerset, being that he's leaving the workforce and has spent an entire career trying to solve crimes, especially in this very dirty city like Garrett was talking about earlier, where it just seems like there's no hope and it's not going anywhere, Somerset is discouraged. And he's looking at this case in a very intellectual way that, I don't think I can even help the situation anymore. I don't really care and I just kind of want to retire. And then in absolute contrast to that, you have Mills. Like I said earlier, young, ambitious, and full of heart. He comes on to the scenes, I want to help these people and make a difference. And their both responses are complete opposite. Like I said, Somerset with the intellectual and Mills with the emotional. And at the end of the movie, you can see these responses definitely play into their detriment and interactions with John Doe. I won't go into depth to spoil the pretty epic ending that I definitely recommend watching the movie for. But it really shows that neither reaction is quite right. One based purely off intellect and one based purely off emotion. And it really points to how a person needs to be properly ordered. That properly ordered person looks like having an intellect, a will, and an emotion that are all well formed and work together. These characters only have one piece of that. And that serves their detriment. So it just definitely shows how a person needs to be virtuous and well formed. Dave, thank you so much for that analysis. And just to conclude here, Dave and I were very excited to be doing this podcast. It's our first one. We're good friends. We've been friends since freshman year. We're finishing up and we're just so excited to be doing this. And, you know, he's just talking about that partnership between Somerset and Mills. And it's just fun for us just to think about, you know, our own strengths, our own weaknesses. I pride myself on being a great teammate of David's. We play Frisbee together here. We're classmates here. We live on the same campus. We seemingly do pretty much everything together. And it's been a blessing. And we look forward to doing more podcasts. This is just the first one. Again, this is the Fisher's Amend podcast being brought to you live from Southwest Florida, Ave Maria. Again, thank you so much for listening. Have a good night.