Friday, April 22, 2011

I don't want to know the answers...

A second Earth is circling our blue planet. It appears to be physically similar to our own.  Who are the inhabitants? Are they friendly? Are they like us?  Being the exploratory beings that we are, we make first contact to find that it is not only a second Earth, but a duplicate one. The questions abound.

“Our earth has replicated elsewhere. There is another you out there. Now you begin to wonder, has the other you made the same mistakes I’ve made? And is that me better than this me?”  That would be THE question, wouldn’t it? 

This is the premise for “Another Earth” a film coming out in select theaters this summer from 20th Century Fox, the trailer of which can be viewed here:  http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/fox/anotherearth/. It has already won at the Sundance Film Festival this year so my curiosity and hope are high already. I have a feeling that it may be a thought-provoking and potentially tear-jerking film. I have a love-hate relationship with such films but you’ll still find me watching them in a dark room with a bowl of popcorn and a box of tissues, but I digress.

What if there was another me? What if I had a second chance? What if I could see how my second life had been dealt? Would I even want to? Would it be different? If so, how much? Would I want to see what I might have ‘missed’? What would have been if I’d chosen to go left instead of right? If I had said no instead of yes or yes instead of no?

The possibilities are truly endless and I’m not certain that I would want to know the answers to those questions. I don’t think I want to know what could have been. I am already filled with regret for many of the choices I have made. I’m already wondering what could have happened differently. Do I need to literally know what could have been? Do I need to have ‘what could have been’ laid out right in front of me?

It all seems to come down to a handful of those annoying questions in the end - questions I really would rather avoid if at all possible: Why am I filled with regret? Why do I want things to be different than they are? Why can I not accept that this life is mine. Why can I not own my decisions and feel so much better for them?

So there’s the rub. And maybe that’s what this film is going to be about in the end. Either way, I’m curious to discover it’s full story and the questions that it lays out before us. I’m sure I’ll be answering a few more of my own questions later this summer.