#The hollow man 2 full movie serial#
This terrifying assault positions its unseen assailant as the invisible antagonist of Sidney J Furie’s The Entity, while his later serial attacks on his colleagues, trapped with him in the corridors of their underground laboratory, make him like the face-raping, kill-happy extra-terrestrial lurker in Ridley Scott’s Alien. “Who’s gonna know?”, Sebastian tells himself before sneaking into the apartment opposite and raping his neighbour. Yet if Sebastian turns bad once he becomes invisible and, now that he no longer has to – or even can – look himself in the mirror, ends up doing all the things that Plato’s Glaucon catalogues, Hollow Man will repeatedly pose the question of whether Sebastian’s animalistic reversion is down to a damaging side-effect of his experimental serum, or to his own nature, now left unrestrained by any sense of public shame or compunction. Pretty soon Sebastian becomes his own concept – a signified without a signifier, in the absence of his actual visible presence. “The concept of Sebastian,” as Linda tells her new lover – also a colleague – Matt Kensington (Josh Brolin), “is much more appealing than Sebastian himself.” Sebastian’s work colleague Linda McKay (Elisabeth Shue) stopped going out with him because she could see that Sebastian only had room in his life for Sebastian, and that he wasn’t ever really there. In the opening scene in his apartment, after he once again fails to reconfigure cells on a computer model (‘unstable’ is the text on his screen, referring as much to Sebastian as to his work), he distracts himself by spying on a woman undressing in the apartment opposite.Īn egotistical alpha male who drives a flashy Porsche, blithely flouts rules, has a wandering eye, shows little humanity towards his animal test subjects, and thinks he is not just god’s gift but – expressly, and only half-jokingly – ‘god’ himself, Sebastian is, as his Pentagon handler Howard Kramer (William Devane) recognises, ‘different’. Importantly, the first act of the film introduces us to Sebastian before he tests the serum on himself, so that we can already see – before we can no longer see – the genius molecular biologist scientist in all his potential for aberrant behaviour. Sebastian is heading a secret research programme to develop a reversible invisibility serum for the military.
#The hollow man 2 full movie series#
Naturally, Socrates disagrees – but the moral quandary that their discussion poses certainly informed HG Wells’ 1897 novel ‘The Invisible Man’, which replaced the Ring of Gyges with a scientific formula for invisibility.īy the time Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man, just the latest in a long series of films adapting Wells’ novel, came along in 2000, the scientific achievement of invisibility had been upgraded as, “a very specific and challenging task: to successfully phase-shift a human being out of quantum sync with the visible universe and return him safely with no aftereffects.” Nonetheless in the film’s antihero Dr Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon), we see the same ethical struggle.
These words are not from a film, but from the second book of Plato’s Republic, as Socrates’ interlocutor Glaucon argues that even the most just of men would be corrupted by the powers of invisibility conferred by the mythical Ring of Gyges.
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