Rodgenet.net

Anyone who knows me knows that I love movies.  There is rarely a movie I see that I can’t find some entertainment out of.  So when I report that a movie is tedious, predictable, and seriously lacking in any ability to entertain, it is truly a sad moment.

THE UNBORN tells the story of Casey (sp?) (Odette Yustman), a teenage girl who — unbeknownst to her — was a twin in utero.  Her fraternal twin died in utero, while she survived.  She is literally haunted by daytime nightmares of a child with white eyes and broken skin, along with other nasties.  She seeks help by investigating her mother’s history (Carla Gugino), who died before this story begins, and through the possible reasons why her mother went insane.

All told, this sounds like a promising story skeleton to hang a creepy ghost story on, but like they say, it’s all in how you do it.  THE UNBORN fails where others succeed: genuine scares.  It seemed to me that every five or ten minutes, the was a scheduled scare in the script, so, being faithful to the script, every five or ten minutes there’s a scare in the film.  Except you can see every one of them coming!  All of them!  The lights go off, a character checks the light switch several times and the light doesn’t come on, what do you think is going to happen?  The camera lingers too statically on a character’s face, and guess what?  Creepy boy scares the character from behind!  I’m really scared!

The writer/director of THE UNBORN is David S. Goyer.  Goyer seems to be in his element when working on comic book characters (THE DARK KNIGHT, BATMAN BEGINS, BLADE, BLADE II, BLADE TRINITY) and he does really well in those elements, but here he strays away from material that doesn’t have it’s basis in something someone else has written.  Perhaps that were things went wrong.  THE UNBORN is an original screenplay, whereas films like THE DARK KNIGHT are based on comic books.

Odette Yustman (Casey) is beautiful, and reminds me of a young Jennifer Connelly (my all-time favorite actress).  But here she seems like she is going through the motions, along with all the other actors.  As such, I had a huge problem empathizing for them.  The movie doesn’t allow you to get to know Casey even a little bit before subjecting her to her dark visions.  Good horror always makes you get to know the foibles of the main characters, so that when the horror begins, you feel something for some if not all of them.  I felt nothing for these characters.  And that’s what’s truly horrible.

Comparing this movie to DRAG ME TO HELL, vast differences abound.  The writer and director — Sam Raimi — shows off his horror roots very well by getting you to root for a beautiful woman and her plight by making you get to know her, then making some truly horrible and imaginative things happen to her.  You want her to succeed in getting rid of the evil spirit and in spiting the woman who cursed her.  THE UNBORN is full of contrived situtations because we don’t know anything about the main character.  If we knew she liked to go dancing, there would have been more of a reason for her to go out dancing with her friends to get her mind off of things.  As that movie stands now, she just goes out with them “just because.”

THE UNBORN attempts to scare you by having the evil spirit be born out of evil experiments done by the Nazis on twins.  Why this particular evil spirit just wants to be “born” and doesn’t want to take revenge against the Nazi scientists who hurt him is unclear to me.  As is the reason for the Rabbi to immediately want to help Casey after seeing a dog with an upside-down head in his synagogue.  Seeing that dog could have easily been attributed to a hallucination or seeing what he wanted to see after reading a Jewish mysticism book with a similar image.

THE UNBORN reeks of a lack of polish.  Screenwriters often talk about writing by saying write, then polish, polish, polish.  THE UNBORN feels a lot like the polish step was left out.  I think the next time David S. Goyer wants to sojourn into horror, he should bring a co-writer to flesh out the characters more.  This time didn’t work so well.