“The Eye” is blind to its own logic
Every time we go into a movie, whether we realize it or not, we all make an effort to suspend a little reality for the sake of the film. This is how I felt going into “The Eye.” I knew that I’d have to forget the rational world, and dive straight into the movie. So I bought the fact that in this movie’s world, there is a medical procedure that can completely cure blindness. I believed the movie when it briefly mentioned “stem-cell research” as the thing that made it all possible. I even believed that, despite her shortcomings, Jessica Alba was really trying to act. But I only have so much faith.
Alba (“The Fantastic Four”) plays Sidney, a young violinist who lost her eyesight at age 5. At the very beginning of the film, Sidney is about to go under the knife to receive cornea transplants that will, apparently, restore her sight. The doctors make this surgery sound as common as appendectomies. After the surgery, Sidney sees only blurry images of the world around her. Her brain has a hard time adjusting to all the new information it has to process. It isn’t long until strange things start to happen. Here’s where the movie falls off the edge. The whole premise of the movie is that Sidney has received these eyes from a donor and now she begins to see things … visions. But, after all the believing I had done, I just couldn’t get my head around one simple thing: How is Sidney alerted to the strange happenings by sound? For that matter, how can she even hear the terrifying things she is seeing?
There are numerous times in “The Eye” where Sidney hears something and then goes to check it out. Doesn’t this completely debunk the entire premise the story is built on?
Sidney is referred to a “specialist,” although what he is actually a specialist of remains a mystery. He doesn’t believe that Sidney is seeing things (but, then again who does in these types of movies?). He is also involved in a laughable piece of dialogue with Sidney, which shows where this movie stole some of its material:
Sidney: “I’m seeing things that aren’t real. I’m seeing …”
Specialist: “What, dead people?” (with plenty of sarcasm).
I couldn’t help but thinking this movie tried to mix two other superior movies, “Final Destination” and “The Sixth Sense,” and just came up flat. After a few jolts at the beginning, “The Eye” then follows the well-tread path of PG-13 horror movies that have come before (“The Grudge,” “The Ring,” etc.). A quest is taken, questions are figured out, wrongs are righted, tiny ironies are created, and then if we hadn’t had enough, Alba gives us a painful voice-over epilogue reiterating everything we’ve just seen in case we fell asleep sometime along the way.
Grade: D