ChanBot i must have seen a different film!!

Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

toneybrooks2003 Ignore all these incomprehensible, inexplicable negative reviews. This is an excellent, well written, superbly acted SciFi movie.

adrian-43767 THE FORGOTTEN is best... forgotten. Pity to see actors of the highest grade, like Moore and Sinise, lost in this very poor imitation of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS.Photography is first rate, direction has its moments, at times this film even manages to be stylish, but the story is utterly unbelievable from the start. What is the moral lesson here? Aliens are bad? Never FORGET that life and time are elyptical? Inevitable question: how could anybody finance this pointless exercise?

Robert J. Maxwell Julianne Moore is the mother of a nine-year-old boy, estranged from her Wall Street husband. The son is tenderly put on board a flight that disappears and is forgotten. Moore is frantic, along the lines of, "Where is my CHILD?" Seeking succor from her husband, she finds that he claims they never had any children. A shrink, Gary Sinese, tells her that such delusions are common and so forth. As is usual in these sorts of films, nobody believes her. It doesn't help that when she tries to explain, her speech turns to gibberish.Finally, she roots out a man, Christopher Kovaleski, whose daughter was a friend of Moore and her son. Kovalevski claims he never had a son but when he speaks her name the memories come flooding back. So what the hell is going on? Well, what's going on is that some supernatural force -- always referred to as "they" or "them" -- is conducting an experiment from outer space in an attempt to measure the strength of the mother-child bond. They've got the National Security Agency on their side, somehow; it's never explained how. This -- this -- force can make troublesome people disappear by whisking them up into the sky.Finally an agent from outer space -- an expressionless nonentity -- explains the deal to Moore in an abandoned warehouse. She's the last hold-out, he tells her, and he wants her to forget about her son "otherwise the experiment will fail." Pardon me while I put on my behavioral scientist's research hat. No, the experiment won't fail. It CAN'T fail. If the experiment was designed to measure the strength of the mother-child bond, that's precisely what it's doing. It's telling the investigator that everybody else has forgotten his or her child except for one or two irregular cases, Moore and Kovalevksi. If there are a hundred cases in which the erasure of memory worked and only two in which it didn't, well, those are the results. For most practical purposes, the bond is soluble.The first part of the film is interesting, shot in the most spectral parts of Brooklyn, which is in pretty bad shape to begin with. We see two people running hither and yon through dark alleyways and cowering in fields under the Williamsburg Bridge. Then, as the experiment is gradually revealed, the whole thing falls apart and become a shabby imitation of "The X Files" laced with expensive CGIs.The actors do a fine job. Moore is under-appreciated. She has a blocky, freckled beauty that doesn't fit the Hollywood stereotype but she's a splendid actress. Kovalevski's role is rather more constricting, but Alfre Woodard as a helpful police detective is compelling without seeming to reach for it.The director, Joseph Ruben, can't be held responsible for the weaknesses either. He doesn't show off with the camera and the editing is classical. Here and there, amid the wreckage, he stages a scene that's both functional and poetic."The X Files" had a respectable and solid following from 1993 to 2002. A reasonable guess is that the series served as the inspiration for this movie. Moore's character is named "Telly," two phonemes away from "Scully."

bkoganbing Some aliens have been conducting experiments where children have ostensibly died and parents have been subjected to psychological experiments to see how strong the bond of memory is. In the case of Julianne Moore it's real strong, she will not forget about her late son who along with 11 other kids was supposed to be killed in a plane crash.But one fine day her husband Anthony Edwards, her psychologist Gary Sinise and even friends and neighbors deny the existence of her little boy. That's not deterring her one iota. Moore finds and convinces Dominic West former hockey player and father of a daughter also whom he's forgotten that the little girl was real. They join forces, but they're really up against some strong alien forces.Looks to me like in The Forgotten that a fine group of players were defeated by a story that made little sense. We never really do find what these aliens are experimenting toward, just what is their goal? After looking for 90 minutes, quite frankly I'm still scratching my head.