What's in the box?

 1995's "Seven" (or Se7en, if you want to be classy) is a horrifying mystery directed by David Fincher and written by Andrew Kevin Walker, who made a career on creepy crime films with savage elements that are hard to watch.  I mention this is a good way because it is rare to see a Hollywood film that goes out of its way to make the audience uncomfortable.

Morgan Freeman is the wise, old detective.  Brad Pitt is the rookie who wants to change the world.  Gwyn Paltrow is incredible as an aspiring head-in-a-box.  Kevin Spacey brings his mastery of long speeches that go from whisper to thunderous rage in a single sentence.  

The film preaches that the city is dirty, filthy, corrupt, dreary and terrible in many ways.  It is a microcosm of the entire world, or at least IS the entire world for our main characters.  So how do they live in it?

They talk a lot about how the world sucks, pointing to an increasingly gruesome series of murders by John Doe.  Mr. Doe is playing out the Seven Deadly Sins with victims who are not entirely innocent.  At first, this seems to water down the horror or lessen the stakes.  There's a vigilante quality to the work of Mr. Doe - a point that comes back to bite me in the ass when we get to the big speech by Spacey near the end.  But before that, let's take a look at how elaborate Mr. Doe's scheme can be....

Sloth love chunk...

Kept the dude alive for a YEAR.  That's moxie.  As much as the film is hard to watch, the concepts don't seem to come from a madman as much a screenwriter after a "what's the creepiest way to kill somebody" competition.  While the scenario is creepy and memorable, it is impractical and risky.  To keep his prisoner for an entire year required work.  Surely a sociopath with OCD like Doe might be able to pull it off, but the setting is so open that a year would bring SOME attention.  There aren't enough pine tree fresheners in the world to cover that kind of stink. 

The entire film seems to be an extension of every jaded city dweller who ever daydreamed about killing every last asshole that pissed him off.  Here, Kevin Spacey voices the writer's cynical opinion about people.  It's just the purest and most evil incarnation of the same feelings expressed by the main characters and exhibited by the cops, witnesses and bystanders throughout this dark, rainy film.

Kevin Spacey could chew through the screen with his acting.

The last part of Doe's plan takes them into a brightly lit desert, away from the crappy city and represents Doe's victory.  He's delivered into the sun and redemption; Envy leading to Wrath.    This last section, once you get through the clever gore in a paint-by-numbers motif, is gripping and horrifying.  Everyone is corrupted in the end.  Everyone becomes what they hated so much. Only Doe finds a tidy, satisfying end to the matter.