The Forgotten is forgettable
by Michele Dawson
the Carillon

Julianne Moore thriller falls flat

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Don’t you hate it when you see a preview for a movie that makes it look really good, so you wait in anticipation for the day when it is released, and when you finally get to see the movie, you realize that it is absolutely terrible? I figure that it is my duty as a concerned moviegoer to warn everybody that The Forgotten is one of these movies.

I was personally very excited about finally going to see The Forgotten after being taunted by months worth of trailers that made it look scary, shocking, and genuinely entertaining. Unfortunately, this movie failed to live up to any of these basic expectations. The previews for this movie do not offer any glimpse of what the actual plot is. Instead, they lure us in with false hopes of seeing a movie that may actually be scary, or, at the very least, original.

It is hard to summarize this movie without giving away the twist, so, here is a brief synopsis. This movie follows Telly Paretta (Julianne Moore) in her quest to find out why everybody, including her husband, Jim Peretta (Anthony Edwards), has mysteriously forgotten the existence of her son, Sam, who had died 14 months earlier in a tragic plane crash. On this quest, she meets Ash Correll (Dominic West), the father of one of the girls who had died in the same plane crash; whose existence had also been mysteriously forgotten. Together, Telly and Ash go in search of their deceased children’s memories. As they delve farther into this mystery, they uncover a deadly conspiracy.

Unfortunately, the twist that lies within the conspiracy is so unoriginal, and unintelligent, that it quickly erased any of the few redeeming qualities that were sporadically dispersed throughout a couple of the initial scenes.

Alfred Hitchcock once said, “If you put a bomb under a chair and it explodes, you create surprise; suspense is when you put the bomb under a chair and it doesn’t explode.” Apart from the overt lack of originality with the twist of The Forgotten, the biggest problem with the movie was that too many of the memorable scenes relied too heavily on surprise.

There were scenes that made me, and most other members of the audience jump. There were not, however, any scenes that caused a tight ball of suspense to form within the pit of my stomach. Although I was watching the film, I had a hard time connecting with what was going on. Consequently, I really did not care whether or not Telly and Ash found out why their children were forgotten.

After all was said and done, I was left nauseous from the shaky camera work that was used way too much within the movie, and very confused as to how any literate person could live with composing the script for such an awful movie. I expected this movie to be the next Sixth Sense. It ended up, however, bumping the American Idol movie, From Justin to Kelly, off my list of the worst movies ever. Even if you go into this movie with low expectations, you will still be terribly disappointed.