I wish I could forgotten this movie...

What a crapfest. I'm of course referring to the "movie" The Forgotten.

As usual spoilers lie ahead.

I'm sure there are some that are going to say that they can appreciate the story and what was being accomplished in this movie, but it all fell flat to me.

When I mentioned to a co-worker that I was going to watch the Forgotten, he said, "It's interesting and really long."

I could tell that he didn't like it, but was holding back until I had seen it.

Really long? It's only 86 minutes long! I can concur, it seems like it takes forever and a day for this movie to get anywhere. It's not that it moves slow. It doesn't. I gets going quickly, but where it's going is so absurd that it defies logic. I had it mostly figured out in the first 15 minutes. Each of the "twists" were not unexpected because if you saw the trailer or any of the commercial spots, they showed you almost every twist that you'd need to see.

The movie starts out with Juliane Moore's character Kally grieving over her son, Sam, who died in a plane crash almost 15 months ago. She can't let go of it. Every day, she goes into her son's room and pulls out her son's scrapbooks and looks through the pictures. One day, at her psychiatrist's office, she notices that her cup of coffee it gone! (dun dun dun!). He insists that she didn't have it today and that she must be smelling his cup because (in psychiatrist speak), the body smells it and relays a memory to the brain and blah blah blah. I don't know about you, but I have never smelled something and then thought I was eating or drinking it. It might have been neater if she actually had a cup of coffee in front of her and then it disappears. At least then the audience might see that she had the cup and then realize that something freaky was going on.

She goes home and enters her son's room and all of the pictures are blank! (dun dun dun!) She pops in her son's home movies and they're all static! (dun dun dun!). Telly's husband comes home (played by Anthony Edwards who probably got the nicest pay check for the least amount of acting in his life) and she's furious at him for destroying the pictures and videos. He insists that they never had a son. Gary Sinese, the psychiatrist comes over and they both insist that she never had a son and that he was still born. She created the whole childhood in her head and what not.

Telly checks the newspaper records at the library for the crash, but there’s nothing in any of the papers about it (dun dun dun!). She runs into an old friend who used to baby sit Sam and she has no idea who Sam is (dun dun dun!).

Then another guy who lost his daughter in the plane crash gets involved. He doesn't remember either. He suddenly remembers his daughter and they have to run from NSA agents at every turn. Suddenly they're on the lamb and wanted by the NSA for some reason. With his help, they try to contact Telly’s husband to tell him that another person forgot their child and he doesn’t even know his own wife (dun dun dun!).

It's all very ridiculous and harmed by the movie's commercials. In the commercials for the film, you see them questioning a guy and he whispers, "They're listening". Suddenly, the house explodes and he's pulled into the air! (dun dun dun!). The problem is, they show you every scene like that in the commercial so I'm sitting there waiting for it.

"It's going to come soon!" I kept thinking, but it took forever for the first person to get pulled into the air.

At exactly 60 minutes into the movie the first abduction occurs. A few more occur after this and each time is no surprise because if you've paying attention to the commercials you saw when each one was coming.

The whole premise of the movie is that aliens run experiments on our lives. This experiment was to see if the parents could forget their children. Everyone did except for Telly. It's not exactly a jaw dropper. From the very beginning, I could tell that this movie involved aliens abducting people although I wasn't exactly sure why.

I thought the movie was going to be about a lady whose memory was being messed with. At the start, it would be subtle, but then I thought it was going to be really cool to see pieces of her memory and reality literally ripped into the sky. Sadly, that's not the case. What's left is a movie premise so dull that it wouldn't even make the X-Files.

A creepy alien guy that walks around like he studied Terminator 2’s T1000 terminator while on slow motion appears from time to time. He’s the one conducting the “experiment” to see if the parents would forget. When the experiment fails because Telly still won’t forget, the screams, “I need more time!” as he’s sucked up in the air. Was this his final thesis? Pretty harsh penalty for failing, if that’s the case.

The ending is a typical Hollywood ending with all of the feel good elements with the sense that despite the fear of Aliens running tests on us on a whim and our children taken from us, that everything is going to be all right. There’s even an “alternate” ending on the DVD that is so similar to the theatrical cut that I’m surprised they included it at all.

Forget about this movie at all costs.