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Jacob's Ladder Movie Analysis

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“War is hell,” said William Tecumseh Sherman. In war, men are driven to the very limits of their sanity watching others die by the droves in horrific and gruesome ways. In the movie Jacob’s Ladder we meet Jacob Singer, who was a soldier in Vietnam who managed to survive the horrors of war, only to find bigger horrors waiting for him at home. He finds himself in dissolution as he is constantly having to decipher what is reality and what is just in his head, all the while constantly flashing back to a day in Vietnam he can’t remember fully, and to top it off he is being hunted by demons. Eventually, Jacob discovers that he and his battalion had been experimented on by the army, and that he actually died in Vietnam after being stabbed by a fellow …show more content…

From the very start of the movie we are given reason to question if what Jacob is seeing is real. We are told he's a Vietnam vet who was injured in combat, his son has died tragically young, his wife has divorced him, and only ever sees the demons. So it wouldn’t be out of the question for him to have a damaged psyche that is constantly flashing back to Vietnam and seeing demons out to kill him. This causes us to constantly question Jacobs sanity, and just how much of this reality we should believe. Upon rewatching the film, we understand why his reality is so messed up, and as a result we realise that Jacob isn’t insane. And Instead we feel hopeful, as we realise that while his reality maybe getting more and more terrifying, we know that soon he will have his answer to what exactly is happening to him, and then hew will be able to move onto a better place. It’s like the old saying goes, things have to get worse before they’ll ever get better. Jacob’s Ladder shows us that not only is war hell, but death itself can be a living hell. Through a complex story full of hallucinations, government conspiracies, and demons we see just to what extent death can be hell. And by using the narrative structures of having an unreliable main character and by telling the story out of order, which make us feel confused as to what is happening and sympathetic for Jacob’s plight among other

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