XXVII.
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the gate :
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods,
«Lays of Ancient Rome» by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1842)
To be honest, beside the interesting sci-fi design and the test phrase, the most impressive element of the movie is the quote above. And that’s from a book that is about 182 years old. But it fits perfectly in the movie.
Beautifully done, incl. visually with the bookmark on that page, and the pages being dirty and except the space where the verse is:
Though the agnostic-depressive in me wonders how these good deaths are possible in a society without roots, in which neither tradition nor religion plays any important role.
But yeah, all in all, a hopeful and solid movie. BTW, if you want to read that book, it’s at the Internet Archive. I had some troubles with the search function (only advanced search worked), but you find a version here: https://archive.org/details/laysofancientrom00maca_0/mode/2up (and yeah, you can download it as PDF there).
