jacob's ladder

Director: adrian lyne

Actor: tim robbins,elizabeth peña,danny aiello,matt craven

Data Published: Fri Nov 02 1990

Genres: Drama,Horror,Mystery

Key Words: soldier,vietnam,new york,delusion,vietnam war veteran

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099871/

WIKI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob%27s_Ladder_(film)

Description: Jacob's Ladder is a movie starring Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Peña, and Danny Aiello. Mourning his dead child, a haunted Vietnam War veteran attempts to uncover his past while suffering from a severe case of dissociation. To do so, he...

Plot: On 6 October 1971, American soldier Jacob Singer is with the 1st Air Cavalry Division, deployed in a village in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War, when his close-knit unit comes under attack. As many of Jacob's comrades are killed or wounded, others exhibit abnormal behavior with some suffering catatonia, convulsions and seizures. A terrified Jacob flees into the jungle, only to be bayoneted in the gut by an unseen assailant. Jacob is next seen awakening on a subway train in 1975. He now works as a postal clerk and lives in a rundown apartment in Brooklyn with his girlfriend, Jezzie. Jacob misses his wife and their three sons, especially the youngest, Gabe, who was killed in a car crash before the war. He is increasingly beset by disturbing experiences and apparitions. An inexplicably locked subway exit results in him almost being run over by a train. He periodically glimpses faceless vibrating figures in the shadows and narrowly escapes being run over by a pursuing car. At a party thrown by friends, he appears to witness an enormous creature penetrating Jezzie before he collapses with a dangerous fever. Flashbacks to his time in Vietnam reveal Jacob, badly wounded, being discovered in the jungle by American soldiers before being evacuated under fire in a helicopter. At various times he also experiences visions of Gabe. Paul, a member of his old unit, contacts him and reveals he is suffering from similar experiences but is immediately killed when his car explodes. Jacob is dragged away from the wreckage by a bespectacled man. Commiserating after the funeral, the members of Jacob's old platoon confess that they have all been experiencing horrifying hallucinations. Believing that they are suffering the effects of a military experiment performed on them without their knowledge or consent, they hire a lawyer to investigate but he backs out of the case after reading military files documenting that the soldiers were never in combat and were discharged for psychological reasons. Jacob's comrades soon apprehensively back down – Jacob angrily suspects they have been threatened into doing so. A group of intimidating, suited men abduct him in a car and warn him against further investigation. Jacob jumps from the moving vehicle, is injured and then taken to a hospital where he is restrained on a stretcher and wheeled down corridors full of grotesquely deformed patients before surgeons, wielding barbaric metal instruments, inform him he is dead. He is rescued from the hospital by his friend Louis who later quotes the 14th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart: Jacob is approached by a distressed Michael Newman, the man who treated his wound in a medevac helicopter in Vietnam and who dragged him away from Paul's burning car. Newman tells a story of having been a chemist with the Army's chemical warfare division in Saigon. There he designed a drug he called "the Ladder", which when ingested massively increased aggression. To test its effectiveness, a dose was secretly given to Jacob's unit causing them to turn on each other in a homicidal frenzy. The revelation triggers Jacob's full recall of the moment he was attacked in Vietnam, where it is revealed that a fellow American soldier bayoneted him. Now at peace thanks to this knowledge, Jacob returns to his family's home. He is stunned to find Gabe at the foot of the stairwell who takes him by the hand and leads him up the steps into a bright light that engulfs the screen. In a wartime triage tent in 1971, military doctors fruitlessly treating Jacob reluctantly declare him dead after "putting up a hell of a fight" and remark on the peaceful expression that has settled upon his face.