Memory Lapse
Unforgettable? Dear God, let's hope not. (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: You might get something out of it if you're stoned or have pitifully low standards.
The Downside: Rod Serling is turning in his grave somewhere.
What the hell was this? Who in their ever-loving minds thought that The Forgotten would make a serviceable movie? I have to admit, I came into it with plenty of preconceived notions. I saw the trailers, saw the commercials. I thought I had it figured out. I was wrong, but this isn't a compliment to the movie. What I was expecting was yet another retread of The Sixth Sense, complete with its turn-the-tables-on-the-audience wrap-up where we would learn that it is (pick one) a dream, a bout of insanity, or even a drug induced hallucination. I thought it was going to be nothing but repetitive schlock.
But in retrospect, I'm sorry to say that The Forgotten doesn't even live up to these aspirations. I've heard of movies not rising to your highest expectations, but your lowest ones...? Now that's something...
The most mind-boggling thing is how Julianne Moore, a talented actress, could come off actors' dream roles like The Hours and Far From Heaven and somehow think that, yeah, this is what my career needs- a shiftless sci-fi, X-Files-wanna-be dumbed down to Family Guy levels. In movies like Magnolia and Heaven, Moore has excelled at playing women whose anxiety and regret make for an emotional molotov cocktail and start to tear them down from the inside out. The Forgotten actually manages to pick up some quiet talent in the forms of Moore, Gary Sinise, and Anthony Edwards, but this never makes a difference because the movie has no use for all of this ability. The actors are superfluous- The Forgotten wouldn't change a lick if they had used rolling luggage racks, instead.
Moore plays Terry Paretta, a woman grieving over the loss of her son who perished in a murky plane accident over a year before. Peretta seems to hold on to her grief like a life raft- and to illustrate this director Joseph Ruben keeps respooling sun-bleached footage of this all-smiles kid's boarding of the Plane of Doom over and over again until it becomes pathos, a sickness that towers whatever psychotic bogeymen are crawling around Paretta's skull. But suddenly, her existence seems to go into rewrite (something that would have been a most novel concept for this film) as all traces of her son's memory vanish from photo albums, videotapes, and even the memory of her husband (Edwards).
What does this all add up to? I'm bound by the law of film critics never to give away a movie's secrets, even if they're not worth protecting in the first place. But what I can say is that The Forgotten is to a polished, mind-bending thriller what blueprints are to a building. Somewhere along the line someone thought it would suffice to tie together a bunch of paranoia standards and a Whitman's Sampler of Assorted Weirdness and this would make a movie. The problem is that The Forgotten isn't nearly as clever as it thinks it is. We have a woman with a missing child, trapped in a sea of selective amnesia, and the best we can get are government agents and car chases? I was impressed by a single moment- a scene where Moore and the car she's riding in with Ash, a father who lost his daughter in the same "accident," is hit broadside while everyone is kept unaware. I didn't like this scene for any story value, rather because it is so technically well done and looks seamless. Of course, once its over we're back into the chase with government agents and we're bored again.
It's in the film's second half that it becomes completely irredeemable. Apparently operating under the marching orders that more and more bizarre stuff has just got to happen without reason, select persons Moore runs across (a sympathetic cop, another government agent) are given the Hoover Deluxe treatment and are sucked up into the stratosphere. Why? I asked that for ninety minutes just hoping the answer wouldn't be some rotting-corpse of an explanation that would be so infantile it would seem like the product of a not-quite-talented middle schooler, but even that was too much to hope for. And just to rub salt in the wound, I'll let a little of this rabies-infected cat out of the bag to say that it makes The Forgotten feel like a blatant rip-off of Alex Proyas' Dark City, a starkly brilliant sci-fi twister which you should rent rather than wasting time with this travesty.
Where did all the talent go and, most importantly, how did The Forgotten manage to keep any scraps of it Moore and Sinise have from rubbing off? In a way, it almost makes me angry. I've met people who have trashed one movie or another because it had the gall to veer off in a direction tangent from what the trailers portrayed. I can't always defend this, but it gets me frustrated that there are legions of movie audiences so dependant on being lead by the nose that they give any surprise in a film the same treatment that witches got in Salem. For those people, I'd say that The Forgotten is perfect for you. It has no surprises, just random plot twists that could have been dictated from a roulette wheel. It has no empathy, no smarts, and no reason to care. It's just fodder to gorge on to keep any real complexity at bay. Go on- indulge yourself. You deserve each other. D-
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