Fales adds that atheist optimists must be careful to avoid fatalism (not to be confused with determinism) when faced with the grimmer sides of human nature, especially in the absence of divine retribution - a task he says secular humanists realize by seeing their short life and great challenges as serving to deepen their moral obligations to make at least a small contribution.

Otpor is credited for stripping away the fear, fatalism and passivity that keep a dictator's subjects under oppression as well as turning passivity into action by making it easy — even cool — to become a revolutionary.

One of the assistant directors on this film (and others by Feyder) was Marcel Carné, some of whose later films ("Le Quai des brumes", "Le Jour se lève") would create a similar mood of romantic fatalism (and poetic realism).