HomeARTSSomething Sour, Something Sweet: The Forgotten (2004)

Something Sour, Something Sweet: The Forgotten (2004)

By RACHEL BOLTON
Contributing Writer

Published September 20, 2011

The Forgotten, 2004–SOUR
Ah, remember the days when we believed that M. Night Shyamalan could make good movies? And how every filmmaker wanted to create the next Sixth Sense? How audiences loved twists that could shock them to their core? Yup. This is one of those movies. Except this time it sucks.

This movie is incredibly stupid. It starts like your average Lifetime channel movie of the week—a woman moping around about how unfair her life is. Telly (Julianne Moore) is still recovering from the death of her son in a plane crash. But one morning she wakes up to be told that her son never existed. All the photos and tapes of him are gone or replaced. Her therapist (Gary “Lieutenant Dan” Sinise) tells her that she made the boy up in her head. Though a good twist on its own, this movie tries to do better than that.

Telly runs away and finds a man whose daughter supposedly died in the crash too. After much pointless running and chasing they realize that they are being followed by none other than the NSA (No Such Agency). And then the big twist is revealed…The aliens did it.

No, really, they did. Some aliens want to eat us, conquer our world, or bear their children. But these spacefarers want to mess with our heads and make us stumble around in confusion for their entertainment—I mean for science! The aliens are studying memory loss and the government has to play along.  Oh, and if you’re bad, they will suck you up into the sky with their big vacuum. It looks as funny as it sounds, and it is supposed to be serious.

This movie is a mess. The acting however is good, but that makes the plot even cornier because the actors took it seriously. The film should have ended when Telly was told that her son was not real. That would have been better than the stupidity that we are left with. You never see the alien’s true form, only a man who looks like he’s fresh off a police lineup. The audience is left to wonder why anyone would travel from a galaxy far, far away to Photoshop children out of photographs.

If you want to watch a good movie about memory loss with a good twist, check out my review of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento in next week’s edition of The Chronicle.

Credit/Sony 2004

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