Thursday, September 22, 2005
Dragonfly - Movie Review
Interesting movie. Not a great movie, or even really a good one, but interesting. It was part supernatural ghost-story thriller, part study of a driven guy suffering through bereavement. The first part was kind of cheap and dumb, while the second would have made for a much more interesting movie if it hadn't been trampled over by the ghost story part. It's not common you'll find me saying, If only there could have been less magic spookiness and more realistic grieving. It's odd, though - in much the same way Kevin Costner was seeing his wife trying to contact him from the afterlife, I saw a good movie trying to contact me through the confused mess of this one.
The ghost story part was cheesy, but somewhat effectively done. The startles were there, and they were cheap, but they were often surprisingly low-key, which made them somehow more scary. The doctor's response to these unrealistic things seemed pretty realistic, at least at first - skeptical, then hopeful, then worried about his sanity, in a believable way. It's when he headed to Venezuela that the movie tossed believability out the window and wandered into some kind of stunt-laden National Geographic special, which seemed a bit exploitative of the individuals depicted. It's one thing for National Geographic to go to a remote tribe and investigate their culture; it's another entirely for these guys to go to the tribe, hand them prop spears, and make them boogeymen in a ghost-story movie.
I figured out what was going on early enough to make the ending not any kind of surprise at all, but not early enough that I can scornfully mock the plotting. I'm sure some poindexters had it all sussed within minutes, but that's not usually me. I watched some of the deleted scenes, and they would certainly have made it a lot more obvious what was coming, so deletion was a good choice. The deleted scenes also showed most of the doctor's hallucinations as dream sequences where he woke up at the end, which would have made for a completely different movie.
The problem I have with these kinds of things, where a rational guy discovers that there ARE supernatural forces, that the dead CAN contact you, and that everybody's linked by some kind of ethereal cheesecloth binding us all together, is that they're just cheap wish-fulfilment. These are things that people want to believe but have no proof of. In a movie like this, there is proof of the supernatural, so there's no reality to it at all, and no ambiguity to the rational protagonist's eventual conversion to spiritualism.
I'm telling you, a much more interesting movie would be one where the doctor could even have had some of these flashbacks, but it remained ambiguous in our minds and his whether he was actually having supernatural contact or just stress-related hallucinations. An even better movie would be one where the ghostly stuff fades, and he actually does have to do what neighbor Kathy Bates tells him to - sell the house, give the clothes to Goodwill, go on with his life, wondering whether he's damaged goods because he went a little nuts when she died.
That's not to say I don't like ghost movies; I thought The Ring was great and scary. Damned scary. Cringe-away-from-the-screen, wonder-why-I-paid-eight-bucks-for-this scary. But that movie establishes early on that regular rules don't apply, that there is a vicious malevolent dead person/demon that wants to hurt us. The movie isn't about whether, it's about how, and how bad. I tell ya, all I need to see is that black-and-white well on a TV and I get chills.
In this movie, the message is that near-death experiences are real. They even present "evidence" for them several times. To their credit, the counterbalancing arguments are also presented, albeit by annoying minor characters. But the main character starts as a non-believer and comes to believe, which isn't fair, because his dead wife is actually rearranging his laundry and giving big-eyed kids secret messages. If that happened to me as unambiguously as it's presented here, I'd believe it too - anybody would. But it's a movie - they can make anything happen.
The problem is, I think the writers and director are true believers themselves. They want us to believe that if you just want to hard enough, you can converse with the dead. In reality, you can talk to the dead all you want, but they don't answer back, no matter how much you want them to. The more time you spend trying, the less time you have to spend living.
The ghost story part was cheesy, but somewhat effectively done. The startles were there, and they were cheap, but they were often surprisingly low-key, which made them somehow more scary. The doctor's response to these unrealistic things seemed pretty realistic, at least at first - skeptical, then hopeful, then worried about his sanity, in a believable way. It's when he headed to Venezuela that the movie tossed believability out the window and wandered into some kind of stunt-laden National Geographic special, which seemed a bit exploitative of the individuals depicted. It's one thing for National Geographic to go to a remote tribe and investigate their culture; it's another entirely for these guys to go to the tribe, hand them prop spears, and make them boogeymen in a ghost-story movie.
I figured out what was going on early enough to make the ending not any kind of surprise at all, but not early enough that I can scornfully mock the plotting. I'm sure some poindexters had it all sussed within minutes, but that's not usually me. I watched some of the deleted scenes, and they would certainly have made it a lot more obvious what was coming, so deletion was a good choice. The deleted scenes also showed most of the doctor's hallucinations as dream sequences where he woke up at the end, which would have made for a completely different movie.
The problem I have with these kinds of things, where a rational guy discovers that there ARE supernatural forces, that the dead CAN contact you, and that everybody's linked by some kind of ethereal cheesecloth binding us all together, is that they're just cheap wish-fulfilment. These are things that people want to believe but have no proof of. In a movie like this, there is proof of the supernatural, so there's no reality to it at all, and no ambiguity to the rational protagonist's eventual conversion to spiritualism.
I'm telling you, a much more interesting movie would be one where the doctor could even have had some of these flashbacks, but it remained ambiguous in our minds and his whether he was actually having supernatural contact or just stress-related hallucinations. An even better movie would be one where the ghostly stuff fades, and he actually does have to do what neighbor Kathy Bates tells him to - sell the house, give the clothes to Goodwill, go on with his life, wondering whether he's damaged goods because he went a little nuts when she died.
That's not to say I don't like ghost movies; I thought The Ring was great and scary. Damned scary. Cringe-away-from-the-screen, wonder-why-I-paid-eight-bucks-for-this scary. But that movie establishes early on that regular rules don't apply, that there is a vicious malevolent dead person/demon that wants to hurt us. The movie isn't about whether, it's about how, and how bad. I tell ya, all I need to see is that black-and-white well on a TV and I get chills.
In this movie, the message is that near-death experiences are real. They even present "evidence" for them several times. To their credit, the counterbalancing arguments are also presented, albeit by annoying minor characters. But the main character starts as a non-believer and comes to believe, which isn't fair, because his dead wife is actually rearranging his laundry and giving big-eyed kids secret messages. If that happened to me as unambiguously as it's presented here, I'd believe it too - anybody would. But it's a movie - they can make anything happen.
The problem is, I think the writers and director are true believers themselves. They want us to believe that if you just want to hard enough, you can converse with the dead. In reality, you can talk to the dead all you want, but they don't answer back, no matter how much you want them to. The more time you spend trying, the less time you have to spend living.
