Movie Review: Godsend
After hearing
nothing but praise about this movie over the past few weeks from people who
obviously have no taste (which is worse than bad taste, mind you!), I decided to
view it in the comfort of my own home. Before
I go on, let me just say that the concept embodied in this film actually had
potential. But not anymore.
Thanks to you, Nick Hamm, there’s one more plot down the drain.
First, I’ll give you a run-down of what happens: Car hits little boy.
Parents devastated. Doctor
of Babies, Genetics, Gynecology, Marine Biology and Psychiatry Richard Ernest
Wells offers parents opportunity to clone dead son. Parents, after much consideration and arguing (about ten
minutes of film), decide that they will clone son (His name is Adam.
I just remembered.). Doctor
Fellatio, err, Wells, implants cell in ovaries of mother.
A few minutes later, a baby is born!
They name the boy Adam (I’m sorry, but this seemed utterly strange to
me. They named their new baby,
supposedly an identical clone, after their old son.
That just doesn’t seem right. God-willing,
these people are eventually terminated.). Another
two minutes pass, and we see Adam, his parents and Dr. Wells at Adam’s eighth
birthday party. All of these
individuals are unchanged, save for Adam. This
leads me to believe that these ‘actors’ and ‘actresses’ have discovered
another dimension where time is not present, and they cleverly have been
residing there for the past eight years. Now,
it’s clear that Dr. Wells has a special relationship with Adam.
He’s a father-figure. It’s
also clear that Adam is psychotic. He
sees things that nobody else sees, like burning schools and hands and shower
curtains. Dr. Wells shrugs these
events off, dubbing them ‘night terrors.’
And, as proof of his genius, he also claims that nobody could predict
what would happen after Adam turned eight, anyway, since the previous Adam died
when he was eight. This is very
in-depth science here. After a
bunch of this random bullshit, Paul (the father) discovers that Dr. Wells’
late son, Zachary, was evil, and the good doctor used some of his genes in
creating the new Adam! This is atrocious.
What Adam is experiencing are the memories of a life he never lived,
seeing himself doing bad things that he hasn’t really done!
Paul gets angry and the doctor beats him with a candle and a funeral
burns down. Then Adam tries to kill his mother, fails, and they move to a
new town, and try to start over. Oh,
and somewhere in there Adam kills a school bully.
The real kicker is, the director cleverly makes you think that Adam is
back to normal—whatever that is—and then some imaginary hands pull Adam into
a closet in his new house! And
everything gets real scary again! This
is, like, foreshadowing at its best!
Okay, so now you know what the movie is, in a nutshell.
The sad, sad part about it is this: that nutshell I just wrote down for
your viewing pleasure is probably more suspenseful and, ultimately, more
entertaining than actually seeing this bombshell.
By this I mean that it was not scary.
It was not suspenseful in the least.
It sucked. Those two hours,
or so, of film didn’t do anything but bore me.
I watched it a second time, to see if I just missed some important
factor, but there was nothing. I
mean, put yourself in my shoes: credible sources such as my girlfriend and
people whom I don’t recall are telling me to see this movie.
This movie is scary. I
sit there, smiling dumbly, waiting for the real Chucky in this kid to emerge and
start killing everyone. And only
one person dies in the entire film, unless you count the kid, who is basically
resurrected anyway. They didn’t
even make that part entertaining. The
bully is shown from a distance, calling his friends incredibly demoralizing
things, such as ‘wussies,’ before finally shutting the hell up and walking
down to the river. What his
eventual intentions were is beyond me. His
friends are afraid of walking to the shore of a foot-deep river.
This, in itself, is stupid. Anyway,
he’s sitting there scratching something with a stick, and he starts hearing
things behind him, but doesn’t see anyone.
Enter—possibly—covert Adam, Green Beret.
You see something swing something else, and then about 15 minutes later
in the film, you see the bully’s body in the river.
This is the epitomy of suspense.