Movie Review: "The Forgotten"

Hey, remember movies about UFOs and aliens and abductions? You don't? Wouldn't you say they've been........forgotten?

Well, the new Julianne Moore movie "The Forgotten" is about that. Now, the whole alien craze sort of died out in the late '90s after the X-Files lost Mulder and totally sucked pooballs. Up until then, every summer movie was about some kind of alien invasion. "Independence Day," "X-Files: The Movie," Charlie Sheen's "The Arrival," the beautiful Jodie Foster in "Contact," "Phenomenon" (wasn't about aliens...but was sci-fi movie until the end....he just had cancer), and I'm sure the list goes on.

Anyway...after the X-Files lost a leg the whole alien craze went away and people started making more suspense movies. That darn M. Night Shaylaman had to go and make "The 6th Sense" and start the whole 'suspense with lots of twists at the end' craze. Ironically, he later made "Signs" which was mostly about aliens.

Well, "The Forgotten" begins with Juilanne Moore playing yet another strung-out prone to outbursts type of character (like in "Magnolia"....only not addicted to painkillers) named Telly. Anyway...aliens go to the trouble of abducting her kid and lots of others so they can erase their memories of them. It's like an experiment or something.

So yeah stuff happens and she meets a dude and they look for their kids and the black lady gets sucked away and at the end the one alien guy morphs into a scary face for a second that instantly turns just a thriller into an alien movie. And at the end the experiment fails b/c Julianne Moore is one bad mother (but an excellent mother b/c she can't let go of her kid's memory) and the bad alien gets sucked away and she gets her kids back...but no one else is none the wiser.

So in the age of suspense movies, "The Forgotten" seems out of place b/c it gets kinda freaky at the end. Oh, and as for the mind erasing, it doesn't compare in the least to "Eternal Sunshine."