A wise girl knows her limits.
A great girl knows she has none.

I think this film relates mostly to the point Ishmael makes about the Taker’s views on the Leaver culture. We see here that civilization and advancement in technology is not as good as we think. Xi in this film represents the bushmen and the Leavers, and they are a happy family, without the restrictions of laws, punishment, or crime. They don’t even have a word to express “guilty”. They are a peaceful little community. The adults share everything, their tools and resources, and the children play cute and inventive games (whereas in Taker culture the children tend to have a more violent nature towards playing and the adults cling to their possessions with greed).

These people live an almost carefree life and have no sense of time (there are no Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and so on) and contrary to Taker belief, they don’t live in fear of being preyed on (in fact, there are scenes where they are perfectly content walking amongst other animals). To find food of their own is no hard task either. They have tools such as anesthetic arrows of some kind that paralyses the animal. And to reinforce the fact that they are such a peaceful people, there’s even one part where the bushman apologizes to his unconscious prey and tells it that he had to kill it or his family would starve. The bushmen don’t worry or fear because they live in the hands of gods. Everything that happens, good or bad, is a result of gods’ works; when the Coca Cola bottle appears, they say it’s something the gods gave them.

Back to the Takers’ world—the movie makes a huge contrast on the two different lifestyles. Everything is rushed and there is an exact time for everything. As for killing, the people kill others of their own kind (the Leavers only kill their prey). If you look at these two cases, you would much rather live in the bushmen’s gentle and peaceful family rather than the chaotic Taker society. From Xi’s point of view, the Takers must be a stupid people because they have so much technology, but they would not be able to survive without them, and that is why the Takers cling on to it so tightly. They wouldn’t be able to survive because they are no longer living in the gods’ hands and therefore the gods don’t provide for the Takers.

The bottle that the bushman finds appears as an embodiment of the evil that comes from civilization. With it comes anger, jealousy, and hate. The bushmen may seem naïve to us, but they are pure and can see something that we are blind to; chaos. And yet we choose to live in this box of chaos; even if we had a choice to live otherwise, we would still cling to our culture.

At the end of the film, after Xi has helped Andrew, Kate and the others, you get a sense that it is possible for the Leavers and civilization to co-exist (if the Takers didn’t have the nature to wipe them out first), but they will never understand each other save for some few people whose careers are out here in the Leavers’ homeland. One of the most important things here I think was the bottle. The bottle brought all these bad things to Xi’s family, and in a way I see it as a metaphor that the Takers are corrupted, therefore the things they make are also corrupted, and not only are they confined to corrupt themselves but they also corrupt other peoples. If it hadn’t been for Xi’s decision to get rid of the bottle, the friendly and peaceful family of the bushmen might have been ruined. On a larger scale, the Takers are on a path to destruction as well. We might not see it, but it was shown very effectively in the film because of a large contrast with the Leavers. The bushmen had time to turn back, but we might not be so lucky. If we don’t get rid of our “evil thing” soon, it might be too late to save ourselves from being ruined.