Aug 23, 2006 06:42 PM
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Just now finished watching a 2004 thriller or action or sentiment or drama or whatever-genre-you-want-to-call-this movie called "The Forgotten".
Well, there is only one way to correctly analyze the movie. In fact one sentence that has been trying to pop off my cranium since the first three minutes of the movie - The movie is best forgotten and not discussed or written about anywhere.
However if I do it, my agony; my frustration and the unrealistic upwards correction of my cynical nature will remain at least for the rest of this weekend and I don't want my Sunday to be spoiled. Hence I am blurting it all out.
Oh Boy Hollywood! You sometimes crack me up so much... so much that I tend to give our good old Tollywood a thumbs up in comparison with the meaningless garbage you churn out year in and year out with scant regard to logic or sense or instinct. Tell me this. Did you really think you'd be able to get away with something like "The Forgotten"?
If you haven't seen the movie and have plans of watching it (May God be with you) don't read further because this contains the entire story told in black and white and without any time slice techniques. Well, I sometimes derive great pleasure out of calling a spade, a spade.
So what have we got here? A mother who wakes up one day thinking her son died in an air crash. Everyone else says she has never had a son. Interesting? That is what I thought too. I thought it was a very very interesting premise. I could hardly wait to rent the movie.
Then we realize the woman is telling the truth because she is the protagonist of the movie. She can't be a nutcase. So why is everyone else saying she is imagining her non existing son? In fact the photo albums, the cassettes everything is blanked out. There is simply no proof that her son has ever existed.
At least outside her mind.
Let us leave the middle one hour of this movie alone because nothing actually happens here. Oh I forgot. The heroine actually manages to trip a whole battalion of NSA agents very easily. How? By running in the streets with absolutely no cover. I have never imagined that NSA would be such an incompetent bunch of nincompoops.
Finally we are taken to an empty godown. Deja Vu strikes you as you have seen this climax in three million Telugu movies before. Empty godown. The villain waiting with a smile on his face. I half expected to see the disappeared son to be tied to a rope there and slowly lowered into a pool of lava with the help of some sophisticated but insanely complicated machine.
But no! fortunately we are spared of such scenes. The villain however still thinks he has to explain the whole story to us... I am sorry... to the heroine before anything else happens.
We are enlightened now. We know that the entire world is supporting an alien experiment. We have been blissfully ignorant of the superpower controlling us till now. Actually the NSA, the police, the shrink in a five paise role are all helping the aliens in an experiment devised by the aliens to determine - Hold your breath - the strength of a mother-chid relationship!
The alien asks the mother to forget the child for otherwise the alien's experiment will be failure. The mother is determined not to forget. So the alien wipes out the memories by force... I mean by the sheer power of thinking. One by one the mother loses all memories of her kid.
Finally he asks her, "Do you remember the very first time you saw Sam? You remember him in the labor room?"
She remembers that last memory. But then it is snatched away from her.
As she lies motionless on the ground with a confused expression on her face - the alien asks her "Do you remember your son?"
The mother stares at the alien blankly, "What son? I don't have a son."
With a victorious smile on his face, the alien marks the experiment as success... that even the fabled Mother-Child relationship can be manipulated by external forces.
Or not!
After all aliens are also prone to make mistakes. The mother suddenly remembers that she has once been pregnant. Then everything comes back to her at breakneck speed. Before we know what is happening, she snaps back "I remember my son Sam. You SOB."
The alien is horrified. The experiment is a failure. Good presided over evil. The holy mother-children bond is insurmountable. The super bosses in the universe are impressed by the show and they suck back their agent from Earth and modify everyone's memory (as in Men In Black) to forget whatever has happened. The mother's memory however is left intact as a gift.
So the mother, her kid and a whole lot of other kids live happily ever after.
I need a black coffee. You guys stay as far away from this movie as possible.
