The Eye

Upon going to see this movie the first thought that popped into my head was that The Eye was going to be another poor remake of a great Japanese horror flick. With a storyline placing Jessica Alba as Sydney, the blind violinist, who gets a new surgery that basically, gives her new eyes, so that she can see the world around her. With this new sight however, there are a couple major drawbacks. She’s now constantly haunted by frightening images of death stealing the doomed victims and dragging them into the realm of death.

I began to think that this could potentially be good, I’m sure if your honest with yourself you thought the movie The Ring was half decent the first time you watched it. Maybe this movie could have the potential to bring a genre back from the brink of fear, and with Jessica Alba at the helm, I thought, can’t be half bad. So I check into my seat and try to watch this movie without to must bias against the Japanese Horror Remake.

The original movie was called “Jian Gui.” The Eye had the exact plot and story but for some reason the original movie, which I watched the day earlier by chance, was much more terrifying. Watching this movie, the surgery she gets seems eerily parallel to the new laser eye surgery.

As soon as Syd gets the surgery she meets a nine-year-old cancer patient who tells her not to worry because the world is beautiful. Once she leaves the hospital she begins to start her recovery into learning how to see again. At first, everything is blurry but almost immediately she starts seeing the dead and their “escorts.”

Syd realizes that what she is seeing isn’t actually suppose to be there so she sets off to try and find who the donor eyes came from and why she continues to have these weird visions. Her journey leads her and Doctor Paul Faulkner, the doctor in charge of her recovery, down to Mexico where she finds out the true nature of what happened to the donor.

Once the movie ended, I thought about the general movie idea and thought that it was not to bad. Some of the themes were a little redundant but overall this was a pretty good movie. The acting was surprisingly well done and I never was bored. But the movie had an eerie feeling of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Sixth Sense” the only difference here was that instead of seeing just the dead, she could see them right before they died.

As for this being a remake of the Japanese Horror, Jian Gui, it held together pretty well. There was no time that I thought “None of this is making sense” as the little details of each scene were shown and left no plot holes. But when you think of an American Horror, most times you will think of a hack and slahs flick. Japanese horror films are more psychological in the fact that they will elude to a scary moment but just as you think it’s going to happen, it leaves you hanging for a truly jump out and scare you moment. Though on the many occasions where something actually did occur, the theater was filled with the screams of fear from the people around me.

In general I would recommend this movie to most anyone for the simple reason that right now, there are no other movies like this one. Sure, it has some recycled points in it but what movie these days don’t have recycled points? In the end, with a rating scale of one to five, I would place this about a three and a half. Well directed, and well acted, this movie was pure entertainment and did an amazing job in the transition of Alba’s blindness into her world of sight once more.