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Oh, they were sooo close. They almost had a great movie on their hands. But then they just up and ruined it.
Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy star as paranormal investigators, who try to look at these supernatural events from a logical and scientific eye. I’ll admit the first 50 minutes of this movie are intriguing, as we get to know these characters, what they do, what they believe and fully flesh them out. They’re all fully likable characters and what they do is interesting.
Then the second act pops around the corner. Suddenly, the film gives up trying to be smart or intriguing and instead just decides to throw some random creepy imagery at the screen with no connection whatsoever. Oh, and an interesting main character is just killed off, for basically no reason. It didn’t help move the movie along, it was just there to wring out an emotion from the audience, but instead it comes across as manipulative and rushed. Oh and it turns out it was there to be used only as a red herring. That left a pretty bitter taste in my mouth.
This culminates in one of the most preposterous twist endings ever put on film. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and it only barely explains some of the things that are going on with the film, and it completely goes against what the film was building towards. I still don’t get it, even now as I’m writing it.
I have never seen a film collapse so quickly and so diligently under it’s own weight. The film was doing fine before, what was wrong with continuing with what the first half was doing? It almost as if someone intelligent wrote the first half of the script, and then suddenly that writer quit for whatever reason, and they hired someone else to finish it, and he decided to make it more like a clichéd horror flick from there on out. If they wanted to expose Simon, that would be fine, but the way they did it is so laughably inept that any suspense and brains is nowhere to be found.
This is what I would like to call “How to Derail a Movie 101.” It frustrates me when a film is so close to being great, and yet so far at the same time. So what if it’s pretty well directed, it’s fairly well acted and has an intriguing premise and first half? The second half just completely ruins the film for me. Make your own judgement.
4/10
