The SAW series is one of my favorites. When I watched the first SAW movie, it began almost comically. I remember seeing Cary Elwes in what had to be his worst acting job…ever. I had not heard anything about the movie when I saw it and thought that with the clearly low-budget (it was an independent film directed by James Wan) I should give it a chance. About half of the way through the first movie, I fell in love! SAW got very scary very fast. It became real to me. This very dangerous situation could happen to anyone.
By the end of the movie, I simply stared at the television with amazement. It was very clear that they could make sequels (there are 7 movies in the SAW series). The concept of these films is what made them irresistible.
For those of you who do not know about the SAW movies, they are based around a man named Jigsaw (his real name in the movie is John). He is a cancer patient, and does not have very long to live. He teaches people life lessons by making them fight to the death (literally) for their lives. In the first movie, Adam and Dr. Lawrence were chained to different ends of a room they’d never been in before. There was a dead man laying in the middle of the room in a pool of his own blood. They are both left with a hacksaw and a few clues to help them figure out how they know one another, and figure out how to get out of the room. Without going into the gory details, the dead guy was not really dead, and Adam was left to die in the room by himself. Each movie thereafter involved several potential victims, and a lot of times they were made to work together or no one would survive.
Each kill was a life lesson for Jigsaw, although he never actually “killed” anyone. One of the most memorable moments in the Saw series is when the only survivor Amanda explains how she escaped. She basically said that by putting her, a drug addict, into a situation where she was made to save her own life (at the cost of another man’s life) that he helped her appreciate her life.Amanda is the only character to be featured in every SAW movie 1-7 other than Jigsaw himself.
Every person Jigsaw encounters has been ungrateful of the life they were given. Whether it be a man who is responsible for denying 2/3 of all insurance claims, a man who wrote a book claiming that he had survived Jigsaw’s wraith and didn’t, or a man who attempted suicide (for attention, seemingly), Jigsaw found a creative way to help them see the light. For example, the man who cut his wrists repeatedly was put in a cage full of razor wire which will cut into his skin deeply if he touched it. However, getting out of the cage is as simple as getting to the other side… through the wire. His idea behind this one was to see how much blood he would shed to save his own life.
As the series went on, the story got deeper and deeper. My favorite part about this series? They spent their entire budget on gore, and left little to acting/sets. It is almost as if the SAW series was made in some magical land where they only make movies based on what Michelle wants to see.
Overall, I cannot rate the SAW series as well as I would like to because the general public states that it is a 3/5 at best. Average that with my very important 5/5, and we get 4/5.
Grizzly Bomb 