Premise: After a cornea transplant a woman starts seeing death.
The Ring really hurt horror for a while. Regardless of if you prefer the 1998 original (which I plan to finally watch soon), the American version is a great movie. The cast, tone, and direction are all exactly right. That really opened the gates for Hollywood to remake Asian horror movies with increasingly diminished returns. Unsurprisingly, many of the reviews of The Eye make the point to say it isn't better than the original. That's a shame, because they really could've just said it wasn't very good. The problem these horror remakes run into is thinking that the idea is enough. The Eye has a great premise. Jessica Alba's new eyes sees death. It doesn't make logical sense, but it doesn't need to. It's a clear idea to communicate. It's a great excuse to make Alba doubt herself and see things for jump scares.
As The Ring (and countless other movies) proves though, the problem isn't that someone had the audacity to take a good idea from another country that most people haven't seen and use it for an American movie. The Ring had a star who went on to get Oscar nominations and a populist director of the highest caliber in Gore Verbinski. On the other end. The Eye has Jessica Alba, who has to be deployed pretty specifically and directors with one moderately successful French horror movie to their names. Screenplay written by the guy who wrote Gothika (...OK...), The Big Bounce (Uhhh), and Snakes on a Plane (Yikes). I don't know. I guess I'm annoyed when the lesson from a bad movie is "never adapt or remake something" rather than "put in a real effort to make the movie good."
And honestly, this is an easy movie to leave on for 98 minutes. Cut it down to under 90 and I would've even considered throwing it a Weakly Recommend, just for being harmless. As is, this movie never needs to be seen by anyone again, but there isn't much to get worked up about in it.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
No comments:
Post a Comment