Good special effects and some scary characters put together with great cinematography make this one notch up from a B horror film. Turn off those cell phones now, boys and girls
Cellular memory—it’s not just in your phone.
Adapted from the 2002 Pang Brothers thriller, David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s “The Eye” is about transplants that give more than the recipient bargained for. Can cells transmit memories, and more?
Sydney Wells (Jessica Alba) is a normal, 20-something, blind professional concert violinist living in an average million dollar condo in Southern California. That is, until she gets the break of a lifetime and someone gives her their eyes. Well, not the whole eye, just the cornea, for a transplant. The transplant is a success and her vision is entirely restored (yea, doctors!) but now she is seeing things that aren’t there. Like little boys with half their heads gone and flaming, running corpses locked into burning warehouses.
It’s gonna take more than Lasik to fix this kid.
Fortunately, she is hooked up with doctor Paul Falkner (Alessandro Nivola—“Junebug,” “Face/Off”) who knows all about transplants and the weird things they do to people. Like making it hard to sleep at night and causing indigestion. To bad for Sydney he has almost no experience in snarling grim reaper ghouls, faceless-corpse infested elevator rides and revenge obsessed spirits of the unburied dead. But he is learning.
Parker Posey plays Helen, whose part in this film is only slightly less exciting than her character’s name. Helen. Her best scene in the entire film is when she is taking the picture of Sydney and the little doomed brain tumor girl in the hospital. At least in that scene nobody can see her face and possibly connect her with her lame character at some time in the future. See Posey in “Party Girl” or any of director Christopher Guest's films and forget she is part of “The Eye.”
Getting back to Dr. Paul, he is really cute. Like Sydney, he is a twenty-something rich person who is not only sexy as can be, but loyal, even if he acts unbelievably stupid at first part. But as time goes on, he starts to see that Sydney’s acting out behavior---knocking over tables and people in coffee houses, running around screaming her lungs out, talking to apparitions, smashing out lights and hacking her arms to ribbons while beating out upper story windows in her million dollar condo---might be significant. He takes action.
After he takes action and puts her back into the hospital, Sydney tells him she has to know the real story behind her transplanted corneas. They were not from just any person. They were from a person with a special gift and, as a result, Sydney has a special purpose. And it’s not just to hide Parker Posey’s face so she won’t be recognized for the rest of the film.
The last half of the flick is about Sydney finding the purpose behind her peepers. It stops with the digital effects and starts with the real plot, which is pretty cool. As it turns out, the lives of several dozen persons who may or may not die in a flaming gasoline truck crash at a dusty deserted Mexican border crossing depends on whether or not she can do the right thing. The right thing requires ignoring the snarling grim reapers and bearing up under the deafening growls, crashes, slaps and distorted screams of her audio hallucinations. In fact, the audience has to bear up under these same audio effects and believe me, it ain’t easy.
But in addition to the cellar witch hangings and deformed corpse stalkers she also has to smarten Dr. Paul up fast, and he is not showing a lot of smarts at any point in the film.
All-in-all, a good scary movie and a film all the better for the wisely chosen and executed PG-13 rating. No blood splatter, flying brains or psycho sex. But lots of good digital special effects about what it’s like to crack up, be burned alive, jump out a window, hang yourself, etc. Also, a pretty good picture of a woman bearing up under the pressure instead of just running to Daddy or Hubbie for protection. Tough choices have to be made. Ignore the grim reaper. Good lessons.
Release: February 1, 2008
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