The other day, an old movie came to my mind. The One. It came out in 2001 and stars Jet Li. Actually, Jet Li fighting another Jet Li. It’s the kind of movie you probably caught flipping through the TV on a weekend night many years ago. It has none of the grandeur of today’s movies.
Source: TMDB Posters
But before “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” before “Doctor Strange,” and all the current multiverse craze, there was this movie. A small, fairly ignored movie. And yet, the idea behind it has stuck with me ever since. And it hits me just as hard now, when I think of it, because it puts a very simple thought on the table.
The idea is this: in each parallel universe there is another version of you. If one of these versions dies, its energy does not disappear, but is divided equally among the remaining ones. If a guy starts hunting them down and eliminating them all one by one, he becomes more and more powerful. In the end, when only he is left, he has absolute power. Simple. One sentence. Without complicated philosophies, the film does not show off and does not try to be profound.
But beyond the fights specific to the 2000, this film makes you think about yourself. Because we do the exact same thing in real life. Except, obviously, we are not fighting anyone from other dimensions. We have our own multiverse: the one of the choices we make.
Image source: IMDb – Jet Li in “The One” (2001)
Think for a moment about the you of ten years ago, or five years ago. Every time you made a tough decision, you basically eliminated another version of yourself. When you chose one school and said no to another, one version of yourself disappeared. When you decided to stay in one city or when you took the train and moved somewhere else, another version died. When you gave up a passion so you could hold on to a job that pays the bills, again, you erased another version.
In the movie, the bad guy intentionally travels to kill the other versions of himself because he wants to be perfect. He wants to have no weaknesses. If you look closely at how we live today, you'll see that we do something very similar. We do it through this huge pressure to be "the best version of ourselves."
You hear it all around you. You're told to be productive, to not waste time, to pull yourself together, to get rid of your flaws. In a way, we also want to kill the more comfortable versions of ourselves, the versions that just want to sit on the couch and rest, the versions that daydream. We do this only to gain power: success, money, a good image in front of others. We want only one version of ourselves to remain at the end, the one that never makes a mistake.
But the beauty of the film is that there is also the second Jet Li. The good guy. He has no idea about parallel universes and competition. He is a completely normal man. He has an ordinary life, a day job, a mundane schedule. He does not want to be a god. He simply lives. And the real fight in the film is not actually the exchange of fists. It is the clash between a man desperate for control and perfection, and a man who has accepted life exactly as it is.
I think that is why this film has stuck in my head for so many years. Because it forces me to be honest with myself and ask myself: what would I do if I met today, on the street, the version of myself who made the exact decisions I was afraid of? Could I look her in the eye? Would I be jealous of her? Would I agree with her? Or would I hate her with all my heart?
It makes you realize something that you usually brush under the rug: you are the result of everything you left behind. Everything you can carry today – how resistant you are to stress, what you know how to do, the way you think – did not fall from the sky. It was bought at the price of other versions of yourself that you closed for good. Your power now is built precisely on the things you gave up.
This movie is far from winning any awards. It is not a masterpiece. It is just an action movie shot in cold colors. It doesn't bother to impress you visually or manipulate you into crying. It just puts this idea in your arms and lets you deal with it.
And that's exactly what so many great movies today miss. When The One ends, the screen closes and you're left alone in the room, you're forced to admit one thing: no matter how many paths you could have taken in life, no matter how many options you could have been, right now there's only one left. You. The one reading this now, with all the mistakes you've made, your past, and your decisions, good or bad. You're all that's left. And you're going to have to move on with that.
I wonder, honestly: how many of us could truly handle the multiverse theory if we understood what it actually says? Not about parallel universes, but about all the versions of ourselves we’ve lost on the way to becoming who we are now.
Rating: 90/100