t's been 14 months since the death of her son, Sam, in a plane crash, but Telly Paretta simply cannot move on with her life. Besieged by grief, she repeats the same ritualistic behavior every day: opening up Sam's room, sorting through his belongings and watching a videotape of him playing around. Telly's husband, Jim (Edwards), wants her to move on and try to return to some semblance of normalcy, but everywhere she looks she is reminded of her lost child; when some of her favorite pictures show up without Sam in them, she suspects that Jim is slowly trying to erase the boy from her memory.
Her psychiatrist, Dr. Munce (Sinise), is naturally suspicious of her attachment, since it seems that she is not only holding on too tightly to memories of Sam, but is inventing them outright, but Telly refuses to let go. Searching out another parent named Ash (West), who lost his own child in the same plane crash, Telly begins to uncover a mysterious conspiracy to which everyone but her appears to be falling prey; namely, that their memories of these lost children have been completely erased.
Soon, Telly and Ash are being pursued by cops, government agents and even a mysterious man (Roache) who may have a connection to their lost children. Discovering one dead-end lead after another, the fugitive pair continue to search for the truth, only to realize that they may not simply be pawns in a government conspiracy. Rather, they are part of an experiment whose ramifications are beyond all human comprehension, and as Telly and Ash move closer to the answers they seek, they begin to realize that revealing the truth may not only cost them their children, but their own lives as well.
Giving birth to boredom
After so many lackluster supernatural psychological thrillers this year (think Godsend, Secret Window, Twisted, et al.), one would hope that Julianne Moore and director Joseph Ruben (Return to Paradise) could invigorate the stale genre and transform it into something more emotionally evocative, or at the very least mildly captivating while it's up on screen. Instead, they've followed the same shallow path toward cheap payoffs and uninspired plot twists, and created a Fire in the Sky-type alien abduction story that too infrequently delivers those jolts of pleasure we once could expect from the waning genre.
Julianne Moore (Laws of Attraction) does her best to invigorate the proceedings through some dexterous turns with the wooden dialogue and implausible amplifications of the plot's contrivances, but she ultimately has little to work with and carries the film only so far. As Ash, Dominic West (Mona Lisa Smile) is an actor on the verge of major-league success, but he won't find a launching pad with this picture; he leverages the film's early scenes with a much-needed dose of humor, but he is left with little to do by the end of the movie and gives the picture's juxtaposition of fantasy and reality not enough balance to play as either believable or exaggeratedly entertaining.
The problem is that the film approaches its subject with such sincerity and gravitas that the audience is never allowed to have any fun with the material, which is rife with campy potential. True, lost children (much less kidnapped ones) are not necessarily the best point of origin for an exciting or especially fun Friday night at the movies, but screenwriter Gerald DiPego (Angel Eyes) gives Telly's plight such leaden seriousness that we don't even get to thrill in the few instances of SF action that occasionally grace the screen. The Forgotten is a picture that's weighted by tragedy but anchored in action, and as a result there isn't much of either, unless you count the opportunity the filmmakers missed by forgoing the fiction quotient of that sci-fi equation and aiming for unexciting fact.
