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The Eye (2008)

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

The Eye. Feature film. (2008, 98 mins) IMDB

...at there was an plausible explanation for what happens...

A

young woman lives a normal life as a blind person. She has an operation where she receives donor eyes. The operation is a success as far as the doctors are concerned, but to her it becomes a nightmare. Not only can she see the world near as a sighted person, but she begins to see ghosts and the grim reaper and fire and smoke. She's living in a hell. It appears real to her and maybe it is real.

THE EYE is not my kind of film. I'm not into horror films, not into films about the paranormal or supernatural. I was intrigued by the concept and decided to give it a try. It's far too bizarre for my liking. It just doesn't make any sense to me. I don't get it and never will. I suppose you have to believe in events that can never possibly happen and that's impossible for me to do.

Part of Act II is the battle with her medical advisor. She tells him what she's seeing and he tells her her eyes are fine and what she is seeing isn't real.

The question I want answered from this film is the explanation and resolution. We know this battle can't continue. She'll die. She'll have the eyes removed. Something will happen that will stop what is happening to her. It has to stop.

She realizes she needs to find out who her donor was. If she can find that out, she can find out what haunts the donor and achieve some sort of resolution. Of course, the name of the donor is confidential.

There is an explanation for what happens. Cell tissues retain certain memories and occasionally these memories live on in the recipient. Plausible to a degree like muscle memory, but this film pushes it too far.

That doesn't explain why she can see ghosts and the grim reaper and other images that seem to have nothing to do with the donor. That's the licence the filmmakers took in making this film. (I'm writing this as the film plays. There are too many scenes where nothing happens from my point of view.)

The explanation? The donor, a poor Mexican girl living in Mexico with her mother, has a special gift. She can see death before it happens. When she tries to sound the alarm bell, people don't believe her, in fact, it's worse, they believe she's an evil spirit who brought the death. Tormented, she hanged herself and the eyes with the vision were transplanted into our hero. (Note: Men are hanged, pictures are hung. I see and hear this mistake all the time even by professional writers!)

It's during the third act when our hero makes a trip to Mexico to find out this truth, but it doesn't end. Our hero and doctor friend travel by car back to the US. There is a long line up of cars waiting to cross the border. She has a vision of pending death. An oil tanker will explode and if she doesn't convince people to leave their vehicles there will be many deaths.

Frantically she says there is a bomb on a bus and people run away just as a speeding car comes and smashes into the oil tanker. There is the requisite, large, fiery explosion. She saves a little girl and her eyes are damaged from flying glass. (Note: since the glass is safety glass in a vehicle, it wouldn't happen, but oh well.) And as expected, she loses her vision and thus all the torment that came with the transplant. End of story.

The climax was farfetched and not believable on so many levels, but that's filmmaking Hollywood style. Don't let the truth get in the way of a good story.

A final note. During the second act, our hero looks at herself in the mirror. It looks like she's seeing her reflection but it isn't. It's the dead girl she is seeing. This isn't obvious because the two actors are nearly identical in looks. The lead actor, I don't know her, doesn't stand out with her looks, nothing distinctive--just another dark-haired woman...

Posted 2009/05/26 at 19h43ET in Movie Commentary.

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