Make Your Choice pt. 7

An in depth look at Saw Traps

“By creating a legacy, by living a life worth remembering, you become immortal.”

Amanda Franklin (Saw 2)

Every Saw movie consists of an elaborate web of traps designed by Jigsaw to be a difficult, yet most of the time survivable, test for the subject. Unfortunately due to the fact that there are so many traps and so many complicated connections we cannot discuss them all in detail. I will also try not to repeat myself from earlier posts too much, and therefore will not be talking too much about Amanda.

One trap however must be discussed in comparison to the reverse bear trap that Amanda escaped from. The Venus Fly Trap, as Jigsaw called it, is a trap that is easily compared to the Reverse Bear Trap that Jigsaw put on Amanda. They are theoretically very similar traps, there is a large trap on your head/neck area and you have one minute once the timer starts to get it off or you die an unpleasant death. Jigsaw told both Amanda and Michael where their keys were and exactly what was needed in both cases. In my opinion though, Amanda’s trap was much easier to escape from for one reason. Amanda’s key was inside a live person who could not move, while Michael’s key was surgically placed in his eye. This difference should not mean much in the grand scheme of things, however personally I believe that cutting into your own eye is much more difficult than cutting open someone else. The fact that Amanda survived and Michael did not could be attributed to her “survival instinct” as Jigsaw put it, however I believe that a part of the reason Amanda lived is because she did not have to hurt herself.

Another trap that stood out to me was the Pound of Flesh trap. The game took place in a room divided by two metal grates in the middle. Between these two grates was one large scale. On each side of the room was a knife, a meat cleaver and a tube. Each victim had a device on their heads with screws pointing at their temples. The goal was to put more flesh onto the scale than the other person before the time ran out. Whoever put more on the scale was allowed to live, while the other was killed by the device on their head. The reason I liked this trap was not its design, it was because of one of the victims, Simone.

Simone and Eddie knew each other, they worked at the bank together and they loaned money to people they knew would be unable to pay back the loans. They were both rather horrible people, and this trap was designed to test them. Eddie was a very fat man, and he decided to cut off some of his excessive fat with the knife in order to add more to the scale than Simone. But he did not account for how absolutely bad ass Simone is. After wasting a lot of her time panicking, Simone realized she would die if she didn’t do anything, and in her desperation she picked up the meat cleaver, chopped off her arm and deposited it onto the scale at the last minute. This was enough that Eddie was the one who died and not her. I disliked watching the majority of this trap, but Simone was super cool.

The last trap I will discuss is the Antidote Safe from Saw 2. This is an excellent example of a trap that could be easily escaped if the people in the game would only have worked together. In the tape, Jigsaw states that the code to the safe is “hidden in the back of your minds”. The “your” indicates that they have to work together, indicating that the code is either something they all know, or it’s written on them somewhere. Presumably the back of their heads. I like this trap because it was more of a logic puzzle than a trap that tests your will to live in the form of pain. I thought it was interesting that none of the people in the Game even tried to figure out the riddle until the end. Then the guy who did figure it out decided that killing everyone was the way to go about getting the code. I mean seriously, over react much?

A lot of the Saw traps are escapable or solvable if the person trapped would just take a second to relax and think about what Jigsaw is telling them. At the end of the day, those in the Saw traps need to realize that Jigsaw’s goal isn’t necessarily to kill them, it’s to test them in ways they have never been tested before. If they were to realize this, I think more people would escape. That being said, the majority of the Saw traps are equal levels of extremely unpleasant, disgusting, and definitely not where you would want to find yourself on your average Thursday morning, so their panic is probably justified.

To be continued…

“The rules of our game have been made very clear. You need to abide by those rules.”

Jigsaw (Saw 3)