The Forgotten, 2004
Director: Joseph Ruben
Cast: Julianne Moore, Dominic West, Christopher Kovaleski
Stage: Home TV selection on a Friday night
The Forgotten in short: A grieving mother, Telly Paretta, is struggling to cope with the loss of her 9-year-old son. She is stunned when her psychiatrist and her husband tell her that she has created eight years of memories of a son she never had. But when she meets the father of one of her son's friend who is having the same experience, Telly embarks on a mission to prove her son's existence and her sanity.
Preps: I think I have heard of this piece or started watching it on another occassion, but I am not sure. In the heading, I see Julianne Moore, and I sort of admire her drama casts, therefore I give it a shot.
Reality: Well, no special surprise. Another quest for alien actions that are supposed to be happening around us and we are staring in the sky wondering what is really happening. One of worse interpretations, I might add to this. We never learn anything about the aliens, despite the fact that they are unvulnerable. Does this mean that their civilization is expanding all the time? It could give us a laughter, but the focus of the movie isn't really on the aliens. It's on the love one feels for his child and the power or let's say energy that attaches one to another. In some sense it is supposed to be the greatest bond ever made and impossible to break.
In some sense the experiment with forgetting someone is amazing, because it shows place for many things we would really like to forget. On the other hand not forgetting allows us to grow and spread experience when we come in a similar occasion (not to repeat same mistakes, repeat actions that gave us good luck, happiness, etc). In this perticular piece the case is extraordinary, the dilluted mom which seems to be seeking for a child that never existed (at least so you think up to one third of the movie). Her story becomes solid when she meets a parent she knows and forces to remember. So they have a quest together, to bring supposeably dead children back to life. They are naturally followed and they seem to hide despite the fact that they are being observed all the time. The story would normally be filled with holes, however we need to see it like aliens are allmighty and they will get what they want.
The piece isn't very convincing in the way we are used that similar movies on this topic can be. However, it does make up with the energy the mother (Julianne Moore) shows and love she has for her child. The last scenes are in this sense very touching and can get to your soul very easily. So if you are somehow mushy or feeling sad, it will touch you. But if you are looking for alien chase action, don't expect it. This movie doesn't have it.
My personal rate: 5,0 (you won't miss much if you pass on this one. However, it makes you think about the special bondage between parents and children, and how would it be to just forget about everything you knew so far).
The Forgotten on IMDB
In the spirit of writing in English (I really like that, by the way, as a student of English) I'll comment in the same fashion.
ReplyDeleteFirst I'd like to say I quite agree with you in most of the things - although I found the idea behind the film reasonably interesting, the realisation could be better and I can't help being a bit disappointed by the happy ending.
But the thing I couldn't agree with you is the whole interpretation that people and things suddenly disappearing have anything to do with aliens. The ways I saw it was that with every new thing Telly and Ash discovered, the situation, the creation of the "reality" (produced by whoever was behind it) changed a bit - people disappeared (because they lost their role or place in that version of the world).
But that might be just me.
Oh, just one more thing - two quite large lexical mistakes at the end of the review, last section:
1. personal RATING of the film (rate - the speed at which sth happens/changes; rating - measurement of quality)
2. special BOND between parents and children (bondage - the state of having parts of one's body tied together so they're not able to be moved (usually connected with S&M); bond - a tie, connection, might be between people, atoms, molecules, people and animals, etc.)
Libertas, thanks for the comment! I will work on the lexical mistakes you saw.
ReplyDeleteThe reality in the movie stroke me similar to the Inception (a newer piece), which speaks about different realities and ways to go from one to another. In this sense, I believe that the Forgotten might have switched the realities and at the end they just decided to go along with the happy one and not just a depressing one. If I go along with this thesis, I need to claim there are certain mistakes made in the movie which don't support the "Back to the future" effect. There are certain things you cannot just change and undo. If you think of these actions /happenings as one reality and that there are several realities, they just go on. You don't undo them. You need to go back to the scene where everything started and really make all people forget what happened. In this version of happy ending, she still remembers everything that happened. It would be more real if she forgot about everything and just woke up as if nothing happened.