Movie Review Bicentennial Man

Death—the giver of meaning, the theft of chances

Society can tolerate an immortal robot but we will never tolerate an immortal human. It arouses too much jealousy, too much anger.

• Lynne Thigpen (Bicentennial Man, 1999)

The inevitability of death makes us human. No man can be immortal and death is the ultimate possibility where change or life ceases to happen. Death is unique to every man and it completes its totality. Because death is unavoidable and can happen anytime, the constant threat of death affects how a person lives his or her own life.

Philosophers like Nietzsche would argue that life is meaningless. We were born; we live and eventually will die. Life is pointless in their standpoint but Thomas Nagel has a different perspective, which I agree with. It is true that we cannot escape death but death does not make life pointless. We didn’t choose to be born and or when to die, in most cases, yet subjectively, it is better to experience or have the potential to experience rather than to not have experienced at all. These experiences of us will give meaning to our existence.

We view life in a much different perspective upon the acceptance of our temporality. Death enables us to do beyond our limits. Because anytime we could be gone, we push ourselves to go further than we ought to do. We tend to taste what life has to offer while we still have it. As the old saying states, we must make the most out of it.

Death also makes us to strive harder to achieve our goals faster. Given that everyone has a “time limit” in this world, we tend to make use of our time wisely for productive things.  We plan on what we are going to do in order for us to make use of our life intelligently. This faster achievement of goals makes an open room for improvement, not only personally but also on a lot                                 of people as well.

Death has also made an impact to the society in a very large scale upon seeing life in this post-modern era. A lot are familiar to the word Y.O.L.O., meaning You Only Live Once. People, the younger generation specifically, have been using this word, in social media especially, to describe how people must get to do everything that they wished to be doing because this will be the only lifetime that we get to be experiencing. Clearly, this is a new way of portrayal of the role of death in the meaning of our existence.

We don’t get to choose to live forever but we have a choice to live a meaningful life and worth-having. Did we make use of this life wisely or did we just let it go to waste? We must always remember that we only have one life and death to prove ourselves. After that, there will be no more chances.

Ross Angeli E. Flores

2014-28370

Philo 27 H