Hidden Gems: Joe Versus the Volcano

By Kyle Lee

May 11, 2016

Pictured: Joe. Not pictured: The Volcano

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And that’s Joe - once asleep like the rest of the masses, now awake and in awe of what he finds. In the movie’s most beautiful and transcendent moment, as Joe and Patricia are floating in the ocean, Joe, battered, sun baked, and weakened by dehydration, looks over the horizon at the giant rising moon. He’s been on his journey of appreciating life again and almost begs to the moon, prays to it, “Dear God, whose name I do not know,” his arms outstretched in an almost religious surrender, “Thank you for my life. I forgot how big... thank you. Thank you for my life.”

Now that I think about it, this would make a great double feature with my previous entry, Defending Your Life. Both are about not letting fear rule your life. About how you need to follow your desires and only then can you achieve something worth achieving. Only by being true to yourself can you get to somewhere bigger than yourself. Both skirt around religion by not mentioning it, but tackling the themes and elements at religion’s core. Both are also, of course, brilliant and funny and thought provoking and we’d be much better off if everyone saw them. If I owned a theater, this would totally be a double feature I’d set up.




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I believe I saw the movie opening weekend, for my brother's 10th birthday. Of course I would’ve only been seven at the time, so I didn’t really appreciate the movie. Two things that stuck out in my memory as things I liked. Joe catching a hammerhead shark while fishing and the island people’s love of orange soda now are among the things I’m not sure quite work, at least not as well as the rest of the movie. Still, this movie is so singular that I agree with Ebert saying, "Gradually during the opening scenes of Joe Versus the Volcano my heart began to quicken, until finally I realized a wondrous thing: I had not seen this movie before. Most movies, I have seen before. Most movies, you have seen before. Most movies are constructed out of bits and pieces of other movies, like little engines built from cinematic Erector sets. But not Joe Versus the Volcano." He later added “I continue to believe it deserves greater recognition, and cannot understand why I gave it 3.5 stars instead of four.”

It’s a movie that deserves to be seen by more people. And even if you saw it when it came out, time is often kind to movies that try to be different than everything else. I believe time has been kind and will continue to be kind to Joe Versus the Volcano.


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