To anyone who was born and/or raised in Aurora, Colorado, it has always been (and will always be) plain old Aurora. A city filled with suburbs, a ridiculous amount of 5A high schools, shopping malls, traffic and half a million people. To the rest of the world, it’s the city where the theater shooting occurred.
On July 20, 2012, 12 innocent movie-goers lost their lives in a theater showing “The Dark Knight Rises” at Century 16. You never think that something this awful can happen in your town... until it does. People who grow up in Aurora already hear enough about Columbine, another deadly shooting that happened only 30 minutes away. Then the theater shooting happened and it obviously shook up our town.
Now word is out that there’s a soon-to-be-released film that is loosely based upon the Aurora theater shooting. It is called 'Dark Night’, a reference to the movie playing at the time of the shooting. Directed by Tim Sutton, the movie supposedly follows the lives of average people throughout their day, which then leads up to them all going to the movies. Obviously, as the movie is based upon the shooting, the audience is already aware of the final outcome.
I find this movie to be insensitive, and I haven’t even seen it yet. My first thought automatically goes out to the families that lost loved ones in this shooting, and all of those impacted and injured that survived and live with those thoughts on a daily basis. Were they aware that a movie was being made surrounding an event that ruined their lives? Were they ever asked if they thought it could be beneficial or a good idea? It’s not fair to make these people keep reliving something even more than they already have to, and this movie is doing just that. It was an act of senseless violence that tore apart so many families and tested the strength of an entire city. It seems insensitive to me to create a piece of entertainment based upon something that was so harmful.
The main purpose of this film is to showcase the problem with gun violence in American culture. However – gun violence could be showcased in many other situations. A horrific event does not need to be recreated and replayed in order for people to be informed about gun violence. Creating a fictional situation may have been a much better alternative for this film, and still gotten the point across just as well. Furthermore, there have been mass shootings that have occurred since Aurora. If the actual event and the loss of human lives doesn’t bring up change in gun policy, I highly doubt that a movie will. There’s already talk regarding gun control; making a movie based upon an event that ruined so many lives was not the way to go about it.
Aurora has been resilient, because you can't let senseless violence ruin the spirit of a community. However, it is natural that the impacts of the event are still something that are prevalent throughout the city. However, for all of the people that were impacted by this horrible tragedy, that pain and those memories will never recover or go away. I hope that the creator of this movie took all of that into consideration before he decided that creating 'Dark Night' was a good idea.
