Review of The Forgotten (2004) by Joshua H — 30 Aug 2008

The Forgotten is like drinking too much at a party. It's great once it starts, but once you get to the end of it, you puke up any fun you had. The film maintains a consistent streak of being an entertaining, tightly crafted thriller at first, but the last block all but ruins the experience.

Telly Paretta (Julianne Moore) is grieving over the loss of her son. It's been 14 months since he died in a plane crash and she's finally making progress on coming to peace with it. But all of a sudden, she's being told he never existed. The pictures and videos of him are gone, his belongings are missing, and the people that knew about him say they've never heard of him. She refuses to believe this and seeks out the help of Ash (Dominic West), a retired hockey player who lost his daughter in the same plane crash. He thinks she's crazy and claims to have never had a daughter, but after jogging his memory, he decides to help Telly. They go off to discover what happened to their children and why any and all traces of them are gone.

That's a great set-up. It's a bit contrived, but it's intriguing enough to make a great movie. And it started like it might be just that. The first hour of this film is exciting. So many thoughts were running through my mind. What happened to their kids? Are they just crazy? Who is behind all of it? I was on the edge of my seat, but I ended up slumping in my chair as the film went on. I was anxious to unravel the conspiracy and I had many ideas of what it might be. One of those ideas happened to be right. Unfortunately, it was the one that I was hoping and praying it wouldn't be. Needless to say, as it unfolded, I was underwhelmed. It's the type of solution that you could slap onto the tail end of any conspiracy movie and it would work, in the most basic sense anyway. I don't want to ruin anything, but suffice it say, we've seen this before in many other movies. Instead of coming up with an intelligent and thought provoking resolution, the film was content to swim the shallow end and deliver a derivative, ridiculous, and stupid cop-out.

To address the NSA's involvement in the whole thing would undermine the actual source of the conspiracy. But they do play a major role in the film working with the mystery conspirators. But given the source of the whole ordeal, the NSA was unnecessary. Couldn't the ones responsible simply pluck them out of nowhere? It's hard to explain exactly what I mean without ruining anything, but the NSA members were only there to provide a reason for chase scenes.

Much like the NSA, there are other characters in the movie that were, well, just there. Telly's husband and her psychiatrist for instance were underused. When we find out later in the movie that one of them is aware of what is happening, he is never shown again. I wanted to know how he knew, why he cooperated, and what his involvement was, but nope. The film had no more need for him. That was that, and he was gone. Once the ending is revealed, you realize that these characters and most of the scenes they were in were simply filler. They exist for no other reason than to pad the length of the movie and provide some expositional dialogue.

Normally, movies that end on a sour note don't ruin the entire thing. For instance, the recent Stephen King adaption The Mist had an incredibly bad ending, but it didn't rely on that one scene to pull it through. But this movie did. Regardless of how interesting the majority of a film is, the ending will make or break it. If it's good, you can think back and justify most, if not all, of the events that happened. But if it's bad, the previous scenes usually don't make much sense and/or are unnecessary. Unfortunately, this movie falls in the latter category. The ending is so stupid, so cliched, and so boring that it simply takes away from the rest of the film. Here's what I suggest. Watch the first hour of The Forgotten, then turn it off, and create your own ending. Then you might fool yourself into thinking you saw a great film.