Let me spoil a great film for you!
Riders of Justice is a pretty violent exploration of the nature of “Events” and how they play out in our lives, but also an attempt to make sense of meaningless tragedy.
The film is about a Danish family that’s ripped apart by the mothers death in an apparently freak accident.
One of the characters in the film decides that he’s seen something that doesn’t make sense, and that the “freak” accident is actually a hit attempt on a Biker Gang member, who about to turn states evidence against his group. The character “Otto” sees a shifty looking guy throwing away an expensive burger, fries and shake, and jumping off the train the very stop before their carriage was destroyed.
They check surveillance footage, and the first attempt makes the would be assassin out to be a Turkish Teacher who lives in Istanbul..
Not satisfied with this nonsensical answer, they lower the threshold of the search a little and suddenly the brother of the boss of the Gang is identified.
This leads them to go question him; our hero, the father of the family played by the excellent Mads Mikklesen takes things into his own hands, we find he’s a hardened soldier from the Afgan campaign. In short, people start getting killed.
We see the daughter trying to make sense of the loss of her mother.
She creates a series of sticky notes… “Bike stolen – Car wouldn’t start – Dad not coming home – mum takes me for a treat to the city – guy stands up and gives her a seat on the train – train accident kills her…”
She tries to find some logic to the series of events.
The Term “FUBAR” comes from the US military in World War 2. It may also be a derivation of the German word “Furchtbar.”
The acronym stands for F**ked Up Beyond All Recognition.
It was used to explain exactly this moment, when all the stars collide and everything blows up in your face.
There’s been a few days in my life when I was party to something like that.
A friend’s mother lives in a remote area of Portugal.
She was off to an important meeting in Germany.
A few days before she was due to leave, her car broke down, meaning that she would have to reply upon her business partner for a lift.
The next day, HIS car also broke down!
It wasn’t a huge drama, as I and my friend were heading down there to look after the place anyway, and she would be able to use our car.
Everything was looking OK.
In another part of the world, I had spent a few days away in Spain filming for my Documentary with a hire car, and a huge amount of driving.
I’d had to fill the car with petrol four times on that sojourn.
On our way down to this friend’s mother’s house, I filled the car once again.
We arrived on time, went for dinner to celebrate my friend’s birthday, and had a lovely night.
We decided to go fill the tank, before my friend’s mother set off for the airport the next day.
Half way to our fill-up, the car started behaving erratically.
(Have you guessed already! The car in question is a diesel car – I’d put petrol into it, by mistake! Having been using the green pump extensively for the past few days, my brain was on auto-pilot, a mistake I’ve never made before.. and will never make again I hope!)
We limped to the petrol station with the idea of putting a full tank of diesel in to dilute the petrol.
Apparently, if it’s only a small percentage this will work, and I’d only added about 10 litres to a 60 litre tank. We were really hopeful.
On arrival at the petrol station, we discovered that the 24 hour petrol pumps weren’t functioning. They had broken down at 8:15pm that night, and there was nobody to help fix them.
We found a pipe, how amazing! We tried to drain the tank, but the pipe was about 1cm too short!
We gave up and phoned the rescue service and a Taxi.
The rescue service mixed everything up, and didn’t seem to register our case at all.
We slept fitfully for a few hours in the car waiting for them, and phoned again.
“Oh! Did we still need help? We thought you were going to siphon the tank, and a Taxi was coming!” – It was going to be another two hour wait!
As you can imagine, I was feeling terrible by now, having been the final straw that broke the chances of this lady getting to Berlin.
We cooked a plan to get her to a train early next morning, and she booked a new flight from Faro as there were no flights from Lisbon.
We Taxied home and fell into bed at 4am.
She was due to leave with her neighbour for the station, at 9:30am.
There had been a train strike the day before which had stopped her work colleague getting back to help us. He was due to be on this train from Lisbon, he’d get off, she’d get on, she’d head to the airport in Faro, he would come home to help us with some crucial work on the farm.
Then we heard all trains were cancelled!
The final bullet through the head of this valiant and very expensive plan.
Not more than a few hours later, the whole of Spain and Portugal were plunged into the Dark Ages, as the Iberian Peninsula and some of France, lost all electricity!
It’s interesting that my friend’s mother would have been on the train, no doubt stranded in the Portuguese countryside, miles from home and stuck for a day or two…
She said to me, “it was clear that the Universe was trying to tell me to stay home, but I wasn’t listening too well!”
There is an interesting aside to this story.
If she’d had left, the work on her farm would never have been completed, which would have damaged the crops irrevocably.
Strangely, but staying home, a really important task was completed in time, saving many plants.
What about our Danish family?
Everybody, and I mean Everybody ends up getting shot! But as the smoke clears, we find a few months later that the father and daughter were only wounded, and survived and the Bike Gang was wiped out.
A great result, a feelgood ending.
However, the penultimate seen sees Otto the statistician, talking to the daughter about her sticky note trail, and explaining to her, that every event has thousands of possible permutations and that it’s impossible to make any meaning of what happened. What bearing could her bike being stolen have on her mother’s death?
Essentially there are too many moving parts for us to be able to calculate the possibilities.
We are seeing now that AI is popping into so many aspects of our lives.
It’s true to say that AI can crunch data in exceptionally impressive ways, that we can’t juggle in our own heads.
The issue with AI, is that it doesn’t have the soft skills that we have developed for 200,000 years to interpret situations.
The logical conclusion is not always the correct conclusion to fit the circumstances.
In the USA, Law Enforcement has been working on predicting where the next crime will be committed, based on statistics.
Several people have been wrongly arrested, or wrongly identified in this process, making their lives exceptionally difficult.
In point of fact, in one experiment the AI was only right in less than 2% of the cases, yet these systems are still being used!
The next step is to predict WHOM will commit the next crime.
This would be judged on previous criminal records, income, opportunity, character etc.
The issue is that nothing in the software considers the possibility that somebody might turn over a new leaf and be trying to “go straight”
AI can’t fathom human behaviours in this way.
The factors that lead to my friend’s mother not being able to get to Germany were so “out there” and unbelievable!
For three cars to stop working at the same time as the Diesel pump went out of order, at the same time as the train drivers went on strike and then the power grid went down.
You could never have predicted it. Not in a million years.
Look at the night sky.
There are many big things that we can see, that are relatively close to us, but for instance in late 2024 we found a moon rock that was only about 15m wide, that was going to get caught in the moons orbit for a while and then spin on it’s merry way.
There are billions of objects on huge orbits swinging round the Universe that we have no knowledge of what-so-ever.
Think of the “Events” that lined up that fateful few days, in my friend’s mother’s life.
They too were like orbiting planets, on huge arcs that we can’t fathom.
Sure, her car is old, it’s not a shock to hear that it’s broken down.
It’s not a shock to hear that her colleague’s old car had broken down too..
People make mistakes and put petrol in diesel cars every day (albeit that I have never made this particular mistake before…)
There are often train strike and power cuts.
But what makes them all line up in this astonishing way!
We often say that bad fortune comes in threes.
I have nothing to say on the subject really, but for the fact that if you are “Swimming against the tide” and “pushing stones up hills,” you are opening the door and inviting the Universe to kick you up the bum!
We should always do everything in our power to align ourselves with the simplicity and flow of our lives.
The final scene of the Movie?
We see a Turkish School teacher coming home from a trip, to his family.
He says “I had a terrible trip to Denmark, the food was horrible and so expensive; I had to throw away my $17 milkshake and fries, it was so disgusting!”
Suddenly we realise that the mistake with the facial recognition software, has triggered the wiping out of the Biker Gang, and that the train accident was just that, a horrible accident!
Strangely, however we feel that justice has been served none-the-less!
At an uber level, we are left to ponder the idea that the “mistake” might have been part of the bigger plan, and that the Gang, who had been swimming against the tide for so long, had brought about their own demise anyway!
Just take in One Breath, and sink it deep into your belly.
Stop, be slow and mindful.
Try to follow the breadcrumbs that are being put before you, rather than smashing through every problem with a sledge-hammer!
If you have a “Sledge-hammer” problem solving tendency, then it’s definitely time to reconsider!
Hao-la! (Everything is perfect already!)