Poop Shute

THE FORGOTTEN

Oh my god. I think one of the dirtiest tricks Hollywood pulls on us working-stiff movie goer types is the ol' bait-n-switch. You know what I mean. The trailer sells you one kind of movie and then the ticket lets you watch an entirely different film that happens to have the same cast and crew, and even a few scenes in common, but is NOT the film you paid for. Wicker Park leaps to mind as the only other recent one I can think of. For that review see my archives.

This movie is another bait-n-switch. It sells you something bizarre and interesting, possibly even something new, but what you actually get is... well, I'll get to that.

Essentially JULIANNE MOORE has memories of her dead son, Sam, that nobody else seems to share. She finds clues that he was, indeed real, and sets off to try to find proof that she is not insane. Along the way more memories become erased and stranger things happen. Like people being suddenly yanked into the sky.

SPOILER! BEWARE! SPOILER!

Aliens. F**king aliens from outer space are responsible for the memory holes happening to Julianne Moore's friends and family. Aliens running experiments with human memories by deleting some of them and seeing what happens. I think I liked that movie better when it was called DARK CITY. Forgotten is a lot like Dark City but without the cool looking bad guys or creepy sets or intense music. ...And no HOT JENNIFER CONNELLY either, for that matter!

I don't know what I expected or even would rather have been the cause of the action, but as soon as it was aliens I just couldn't take it seriously anymore. The movie starts off all dark and intense and almost noir-ish and then our mysterious malevolent mind muckers turn out to be aliens who are playing around with some heads. Nothing more sinister than a biologist electrocuting a rat and then studying it's behavior in a maze. Whoopty-doo!

They lost me pretty quickly from then on, so I watched with a much less invested eye and began to evaluate the movie for it's writing. BOO! Each piece of fiction establishes its own set of rules for how that world operates. In Forgotten's world, for example, aliens are very real and are toying with us for their own education. They establish things about these aliens also, like they do as they please, and they don't care about humans one bit. At the end of the film this particular experiment is deemed a "failure" and the alien in charge is literally yanked off the planet. Now these aliens display flagrant disregard for human lives and human feelings, so it comes as a bizarre surprise when all is right with the world and the abducted children are miraculously returned without reason or explanation. They are just back. I mean it actually cuts directly from the final showdown with the alien to Julianne running to the park and finding her son there, alive and well and completely unaware of any of the events that took place. WHAT?! WHY?! I mean Julianne f**ked up their whole plan, and they had her kid. What is in it for them to give the kid back? Why would they do that? I'll tell you why; because the ending that made sense wouldn't have been a happy one.

1 out of 5 poops