Welcome back to Movie Recaps. Today I will show you a comedy, fantasy, mystery film from 2009, titled Symbol. Spoilers ahead!
Watch out and take care. A Japanese man wearing very colorful pajamas wakes up in a white, empty room with no doors or windows and no apparent ceiling. When he approaches one of the walls for a closer look, he finds something peculiar sticking out of it: a protuberance shaped like a male member.
After poking it a couple of times, he presses the tip, which causes hundreds of giggling baby angels to come out of the floor and walls, staying there only for a couple of seconds before they go back the way they come - one thing they leave behind, however: now all their members are sticking out of the wall and floor. This is the phase known as "Learning". As he sniffs the finger he used to touch the weirdly shaped button, the man screams in fear, followed by crying out and begging for help from whoever may be around, to no avail.
He decides to start pressing the various buttons to see what happens, and every time he does, a different random object falls into the room, from a small toothbrush to a big vase. By pressing the same button again, he is given the same object, and that's how his testing of this concept on one particular button gives him a big pile of chopsticks. His amusement is short-lived however, when he presses the button next to the chopstick one and a small cart comes out of the wall and hits him on the legs.
The next button he presses after crying out in pain transforms into a butt, which passes gas on his face. Hours later, the man has accumulated a huge variety of random objects in the room, and when he throws the ball at the wall, it presses a button that gifts him sushi. This excites him since he's been getting hungry, but he realizes that he's missing soy sauce.
He asks his captors for it, but as always, he gets no answer, so he repeatedly presses one of the buttons until he has a bunch of sushi in front of him but still no sauce. Giving up, the man proceeds to eat the sushi, which he finds rather delicious, and once he's finished the last piece, he presses the button for more, getting furious when a bottle of soy sauce finally shows up. After angrily pushing the bottle out of the way, he presses a different button and gets a pair of old-school 3D glasses.
When he puts them on, he manages to see a baby angel pointing at his member, and the man gets happy because he thinks he may've found the answer. However, after pressing that particular button, all he gets is a countdown and a giant butt appearing from above to pass gas on top of him. Some hours later, he's read five volumes of a manga that he finds very entertaining, but when he presses a button to get the sixth, he gets the seventh instead.
Frustrated, he starts trying other buttons, which give him eight and nine but still no six. The last button he tries though, has an important surprise for him: it opens a section of the wall that hides a door behind it. The man celebrates this discovery, but in his excitement, he loses track of which button is the one that opens the exit.
He tries one at random and shockingly sees an African Tribesman run from wall to wall, the next one makes water fall on his head. The third one turns out to be the one he needs, and as soon as the wall opens, he runs to it, only to see it close on his face. His second try ends the same way, and it's then he realizes that the door stays open as long as the member tip is down, so he starts trying out different ways to achieve it.
First, he goes for a runner position, pressing it with his foot. Next, he hits it with a flyswatter from as far as possible, hoping the distance will make a difference in his running time. None of these work, and neither do pulling it with a jumping rope or hitting it with the air sent by a fan.
His following plan is to get on the cart and push it after pressing the button, but after a few tries, he comes to accept he simply can't control it. What he needs to do is find a way to keep the button tip down. He puts the huge vase on top of it, but the button manages to stick back up again, so the man reaches the conclusion that he needs to fill the vase to make it heavier.
First, he tries the water button, but it's pointless: no matter how hard he tries to redirect the water, it only falls on him and nowhere else. His next attempt involves filling the vase with sushi, but it becomes so heavy he can't even pick it up. The neck of the vase is also too narrow for his hand to go through, so the man has no other choice but to use chopsticks and remove a bunch of sushi piece by piece.
Moments later, once he's removed enough, he manages to barely pick up the vase, so he does exactly that and takes it closer to the buttons. When he gets there, he finds himself having to put down the vase on the floor because he has lost which button it was again, and when he tries one, the African Tribesman comes out and accidentally bumps into the base, causing it to crack and break in half. This sends the man over the edge, who, as he freaks out and yells non-stop, finds the right button and begins covering it with sushi.
This, of course, doesn't work either, and the little member pops up among the rice. Then the man tries covering the button with tape, followed by tape plus a steel plate, but nothing works. After taking some painkillers to deal with the pain caused by the door every time it hits him on his back and a nap as well, the man wants to wash his teeth, so he presses a button to get water.
It was the wrong button though, and this one reveals a rope falling from the ceiling. This instantly improves his mood because it gives him an idea for a new plan: he opens the door, then uses the rope to swing himself across the room and make it before the door closes. Sadly, when he tries to open the door behind the fake wall, he discovers it's locked.
He returns to the room just in time before the door closes, although it manages to hit him on his way out anyway, and in frustration, he kicks the wall, activating one of the buttons and revealing the key floating in the middle of the room. Like it happens with the door though, it goes away when the button perks out again, so the man must find a way to keep both the key in the room and the door open. First, however, he needs to find the button again, because he got distracted and lost it.
By observing more or less where his foot would've landed when he kicked the wall, he chooses a button, only to get a dog coming out of the wall to bark at him. The same happens with the next button, but luckily, the third try is successful. While keeping his eyes and a pointing hand at the button, the man walks backward and grabs a piece of sushi fish that he takes back to the wall to mark the right button with.
When he presses it, however, the dog comes out again. This time he finds the button faster and proceeds with his plan: he makes the rope appear and swings on it to reach the different buttons, but it is still enough. As he falls to the floor, he sees a plunger he had gotten from one of the many buttons, and gets an idea on how to solve his little issue: he can use the plunger to touch the wall and push himself farther.
After one failed attempt, the plan goes smoothly, and the combination of swinging on the rope and pushing himself with the plunger allows him to press the button key, grab the key, press the door button, and reach the door before it closes. He wastes no time and inserts the key in the lock, quickly turning it, but when he tries to open the door, he finds a nasty surprise: it also has a separate lock on the top that requires three numbers to open it. The man rushes out, getting hit by the door as it closes, and in frustration, he throws the plunger at the opposite wall, activating the button that releases the African Tribesman.
As he watches him walk by, he realizes something: there are three numbers painted on his forehead, which must be the combination he needs. Since the time behind the door is limited, the man goes through the process of doing the whole swinging on the rope and jumping deal three times, one for each number to be put in. The third time, he stays there and opens the door, which is a bit stuck and he has to push extra hard to open it.
When he finally manages to do so, the piece of wall behind him closes, leaving him trapped and without enough room to finish opening the door. Devastated, the man sits on the floor and starts crying, remembering all the fun he had with the objects he had gotten from the buttons. He had been locked there too, but at least he had room to move and entertainment, and now he realizes he didn't appreciate what he had while he could.
Suddenly, he feels a breeze on his face coming from the left wall. As soon as he touches it, he finds a crack that indicates it's a fake. He wastes no time and pushes the panel open before running out of there, soon reaching a mysterious hallway floating in a pitch-black area.
It feels like he spends an eternity running towards an exit, and when he finally makes it to a room, his hair is longer and the colors of his pajama have faded. This room is also empty and the door he uses closes as soon as he enters, but instead of baby angels, here there are adult ones, who also disappear into the wall and only leave out their members to be used as buttons. This is the phase known as "Practice".
Meanwhile, in a city in Mexico, little Antonio's family is worried because the father, a wrestler known as Escargot Man, is behaving more taciturnly than usual. His wife thinks it may be because this next opponent is much younger than him, but the grandfather points out that what matters is experience, not youth. Escargot Man is picked up by his daughter Sister Karen on her truck and she drives him to the wrestling ring so he can start getting ready early, which includes changing clothes and praying to the virgin.
At school, Antonio is being bullied by his classmates for betting on Escargot Man, calling him a weak loser. As the time for the match to start approaches, Sister Karen takes her van again and picks up Antonio and their grandfather to take them to see Escargot Man in action. Karen doesn't stay though, and Antonio and his grandfather find some of the last seats for themselves right before the show begins.
The first team that enters the ring are the Northern Tough Ones, formed by Super Demon and Tequila Joe. Then Escargot Man and his partner Silver Eagle come in under the team name Kiss Me A Lot. Silver Eagle is the first one to fight for his team with a brilliant beginning, but he's soon overpowered when the Northern Tough Ones fight him together instead of one on one.
They keep gesturing at Escargot Man, asking him to join the fight, but he refuses to do so until Silver Eagle pulls a trick to make Super Demon and Tequila Joe hit each other, allowing him to escape. Escargot Man is quickly overpowered as well. But just when his opponent is about to hit him with a chair, the man in the mysterious room presses a member button and causes Escargot Man to magically extend his neck and knock out both opponents with a hit of his head.
In the room, nothing happens, which calls the man's attention so he keeps pressing the same button, causing Escargot Man to knock out Silver Eagle, the referee, Antonio, and even the bell. Seeing no results, the man starts trying out different buttons. One causes the singer of a metal band to breathe fire above his audience during a concert in Los Angeles.
The other makes a Russian magician fail his trick when he tries to make his assistant disappear, and the third one makes a man in China bark at his own dogs. The man is about to give up when he sees some light coming from above and notices that unlike the last room, here there is no ceiling and he can see the angels flying around in the distance. He decides to try something completely new this time: instead of pressing the member buttons, he will use them to climb the walls.
It works, and every time he grabs a button with his hands or steps on them with his feet, something amazing on Earth happens, from flowers blossoming to an elephant dying. The highest he goes, the more complex the effects become - it's not only nature anymore, there is also humanity and both the little and the big things, like a toaster and landing on the Moon. By the time he makes it to the top, both the man's hair and beard had grown long, and he doesn't need to hold onto the wall anymore.
Now he can float as well, just like the angels, and using all his experience gained from the training at the previous rooms, he embraces his role of God and begins choosing humanity's biggest hits on purpose instead of randomly pushing buttons. By the time he's done, he's surrounded by feathers instead of walls, and he enters a glowing portal that takes him to the last room. This one has the Continents on its walls and a huge member button that the man is about to press.
This is the phase known as "Future".
