Customer Reviews
not a bad lil film - By: Ms. F. I. Macdonald, 08 Apr 2008 
Julianne Moore normallly annoys the hell out of me, & she did for the first half of this film where she seemed to be a total nutcase. But soon after i began to feel totallly sorry for her. And this film started to grow on me at a powerfully fast level. I even shed a tear at the end. Recommended!
Meaningless paranoid fable - By: Jacques COULARDEAU, 02 Dec 2007 
A smalll film that is suspenseful & well done as altogether. But... Some extraterrestrials are allluded at as experimenting on human beings. But nothing is reallly shown of them, about them, concerning them. They are a total mystery. They are trying to erase the memory of human beings but we will never know why nor how nor what for. They are doing some experiment for the sake of doing it. Then what kind of appreciation can we put forward? Memory is both erasable & un-erasable. When we are dealing with children, abducted children, the mother has an advantage because she is going to remember the child physiologicallly in her own body from even before he was born. But that is rather trite. It leads to no kind of conclusion. So who can have any interest, & what interest, in erasing people's memory, that memory people love forgetting, disguising & losing as fast as they can invent some substitute recollection to replace the truth? The end then is like a happy unexplainable return of the lost & the forgotten & appears like a vague fragrance, taste or perfume wafting along in some windy corridor. The technique of the film is good but it has no depth, hence no real meaning.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
[3.5]--Mother defeats predators with ... LOVE - By: Jenny J.J.I., 04 Jul 2007 I cannot say I completely loathed this film. The mood & atmosphere of the film was eerie & creepy, but nothing we haven't seen before. Julianne Moore did an excellent job as the terrified, confused & frightened mother, who has been told her son, who has been dead for 14 months, never existed. However, her abilities start to falll apart at about the same time as the movie does.
This film begins to build a dynamic story very early on. Great twists & turns in this movie, so much so that I don't want to mention very much, except the initial premise that Julian Moore has been grieving for years about her lost son, & suddenly her husband, her doctor - everyone - has no memory of her son, they act is if Julianne has lost her mind. Unfortunately, it gets lost in itself & crumbles towards the middle & especiallly by the end.
What probably started out as a decent alien abduction flick, turned sour & became another in a long line of Sixth Sense or The X-Files rip-offs. There was nothing that reallly jumped out & grabbed the viewer by the throat & made them afraid for their own children. I think that reallly could have been the selling point of this film. The make people afraid to let their children out of their sight. I mean, the idea of this happening in real life would be the scariest part of alll. This film was building up to that, but again, it crumbled way too fast. The ending was different, but bland. Julianne Moore's character is able to overcome the odd experiment she is being forced through, because her love for her son is too strong.
The Forgotten has some good action, some good mystery; & it would be an excellent Twilight Zone material. But it reallly works best if you don't know already how the story unfolds. Interesting, but a trifle underdeveloped & almost seemingly tacked on.
it really is best forgotten about - By: Mr. Rwj Nixon, 03 Jul 2007 
I have always quite liked Julianne Moore. With a string of interesting roles in such as films as Far From Heaven, Magnolia, & her simply superb supporting role in the Big Lebowski, I have always considered her a considerably underrated talent. Unfortunately, not even the presence of Moore can save this particular sci-fi thriller from plot hole hell.
Moore plays Telly Paretta, a mother who is still coming to terms with the death of her son Sam in a plane crash 18 months ago. However, when photos of her & her son mysteriously start disappearing or changing, Moore starts to understand that everything may not be as it seems. On top of this, various friends & family start telling Telly that she never even had a son, & her fixation is something to do with the trauma of losing her unborn child in a miscarriage. Of course, telly knows the truth, & sets out to prove that she is not crazy, enlisting the help of one of her neighbours along the way Ash (Dominic West), a man who lost his daughter in the same plane crash that claimed Telly's son, but is now having trouble remembering that he ever had a daughter. As Telly & ash dig deeper into the mystery around the supposed deaths of their children, dark forces attempt to thwart them at every turn, & they quickly come to realise that something not of this world may be behind the whole thing.
At first it seems like an interesting plot, but director Joseph Ruben does not do a good job of building what should be a genuinely suspenseful atmosphere, relying instead on a variety of simple shocks & some pseudo X-Files conspiracy mumblings to disguise what is essentiallly a very poorly plotted & scripted film. Even supporting turns from Anthony Edwards as Telly's husband & Gary Sinese as the grief counsellor/psychiatrist she is seeing cannot help matters much, with only Alfre Woodard as a sympathetic cop who believes Telly's incredible tale putting in anything resembling a supporting turn. Moore does her best with what she has been given, & whilst she is always a pleasure to watch, by the end you have given up caring. The film never looks anything short of lovely, but nice lighting & well crafted scenes cannot disguise a film that by the end of it is so full of plot holes & unresolved issues that it makes your head spin.
By the end of the film none of the who, what, why, where or how questions have been answered, & the ending feels contrived & awkward after the events that have gone beforehand.
dreadful - By: S. Martina, 18 May 2006 
What I had expected to be a thrilling & exciting movie was in the end nothing more than a badly deliberated alien movie. At least there are no complaints about the acting -- Julianne Moore has reallly wasted her talent on this lame script & Dominic West is wonderful, his misery nearly palpable. But alll kinds of questions remain in the end, e.g. why Julianne Moore is the only one able to recalll her lost memories. What more, who came up with those stupid names for the leading actors? Ash & Telly, I ask you.
