Memes

He had no resistance, he had no plan, he had no ideology, or grand vision.

I think the small difference in our opinions is perhaps our different meanings ascribed to the word "resistance", which does not (in my mind) have anything to do with a vision or an ideology. It can of course but a simpler, baser resistance is what he did, and what i mean.

Why couldn't Lawrence just become the killer the US military wanted him to be? Perhaps he himself didn't know, but in the end instead of moved by the inexorable power to change in to something he was not, he resisted this change. He could not be moved, could not be moulded into what they wanted him to be, "went crazy".

It wasn't a choice, youre right. He couldn't become it. And unfortunately (j/k fortunately. a speech would be dumb) he didn't have the screen time to write a speech on why he did what he did. We're left to guess why he made this decision. Now if we all had an assignment to write a paper on leonard's motivations but weren't allowed to use the word "crazy" or anything about his intelligence, what would one say was going through his mind?

Great movies that don't tell the audience everything also invite the audience to make these connections themselves. There's no right answer either of us will walk away with here but it's a fun exercise and a good one; one shouldn't just dismiss these ideas because they are not spelled out explicitly