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Lizards in Movies
 
Realive (2016)
 
Spoiler Alert !

Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.
 
This is a futuristic sci-fi drama about a man named Marc with terminal cancer who pays a cryogenics company to freeze his body until there is a cure for his cancer in the future. 68 years later, after the scientists failed many times to revive people, Marc becomes the first human to be successfully revived and cured. The movie follows Marc as he has difficulty learning to adapt mentally and physically to becoming re-alive.

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Two times in the movie we see a flashback to when Marc was a young boy, playing outdoors with other children. In the first flashback, a boy shows off a lizard, telling the other kids that they're easy to find by looking under rocks. Then a cruel boy suggests cutting the tail off, as other kids protest. One boy holds the lizard and the second boy cuts off part of the tail with a knife. He holds up the tip of the tail while it's still wriggling to tease the other kids. A girl tells Marc not to be scared, that the tail will grow back, but the boy tells them that this lizard's tail will never grow back. He lets the lizard go and as it craws away he throws a rock and crushes it. The girl is correct that while many species of lizards have tails that are designed to drop off at a pre-determined breaking point to distract a predator. But if the tail is cut off at the wrong place, it will heal, but it won't regenerate fully, and when it does regenerate it is not a perfect replacement, lacking the pattern, nerves and segmented vertebrae of the original tail.

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The second time we see it, the lizard torture scene is during a philosophical conversation about life and death.


The scene reminds me of all the times I have unfortunately had to watch children and adults torture harmless reptiles and amphibians in sadistic acts of cruelty done simply to either impress others or to assert their dominance. It also reminds me of the line from Shakespeare's King Lear: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.

Apparently two lizards were used in the scene because the lizard we see after its tail has been cut off is missing much more tail than we saw the boys cut off. The movie was made in the Canary Islands and elsewhere in Spain but the lizards appear to be one of the Butterfly Lizards from China which are found in the pet trade, such as Reeves's Butterfly Lizard or Peter's Butterfly Lizard.