Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Wow. Goyer’s one hard-working sumbitch. I didn’t realize this was already shooting, much less finished and ready to be test-screened. Still, it seems that they’ve done at least one screening, and we had a pair of eyes in the audience. “BC Bud” is here to tell you what he thinks:
Hey guys,
Just got back from a test screening of David Goyer's follow up to Blade Trinity, THE INVISIBLE. Some spoilers follow.
Film concerns Nick, a soon to be high school graduate (Justin Chatwin from WAR OF THE WORLDS) who is your typical dreamy/angsty writer who wants to get away from his overbearing mother (Marcia Gay Harden, finally cashing in her "Oscar Winning Actress Does A Schlocky Genre Movie" card) and get out of town. Props for making his would be destination somewhere other than New York for once (London, to be exact), but really he is sort of a stock character in that regard.
His best friend is played by the always annoying Chris Marquette, who is mixed up with the local bad kids. The main bad kid is a girl named Annie (relative newcomer Margarita Levieva, who is sort of a more tomboyish Shiri Appleby), who comes from a broken home. One night she goes "too far" (steals jewelry) and her boyfriend, a parolee who works in a chop shop, rats her out. A series of coincidences lead her to believe it was Nick, and she roughs him up, accidentally knocking him out. Assuming he's dead, her and her friends dump his body in a sewer.
The next morning, Nick wakes up and goes to school as normal. Here he realizes no one can hear/see him. He soon discovers he is actually still alive and just sort of trapped in between life and death, and the only person who can help him is Annie. So basically, its an RL Stine version of the Reese Witherspoon movie JUST LIKE HEAVEN, except with an actual funny line or two and less execrable cover songs.
The rest of the movie follows Nick trying to communicate with Annie, a cop investigating, Annie trying to take care of her brother while staying on the run, etc. (there's more subplots in this movie than CRASH). And 3 of them are never tied up: most annoyingly, early on Nick finds himself in a spooky hospital with an apparently blind man who can sense his presence. But they never go deeper into it, in fact, there is no attempt at any explanation as to why he is having this out of body experience. There's also two characters whose fate is never revealed.
I'm not sure why Goyer chose this project. While it's certainly a step above other teen thrillers (this is definitely intended to be a PG13 release) of late, and has some great macabre touches (one must laud anyone who can get a theater full of people to laugh at a teen attempting to blow his brains out), one would expect a fairly talented writer to do his own story, or at least a more original one. I have been reading his Fangoria column Raving & Drooling for years (it actually just resurfaced after quite a long hiatus), and wished more than a few times during the movie that he had applied some of that writing talent to the script (which was based on a book by one guy and adapted by two other people, none of whom have any significant writing credits). As a director, he certainly shows promise, with a great opening shot that goes up to, around, and finally inside a large secluded home, and he even manages to make a few fake scares work. However, there are also way too many trick shots. In a sort of twist on the genre, we see Nick interacting with objects and people, it just resets itself back to its original location (as opposed to waving his hand through an object or whatever). This is shown the same way every time. He throws a chair. Camera follows chair as it smashes through a window. Camera pans back to Nick, who gasps or sighs. Camera pans right back to show the window intact. There are about 20 of these in the movie, and after 3 or 4 times, they become a bit annoying. There is also some inconsistency with his movement in general. In a few of these shots, Nick appears to have walked through a wall or something while the camera followed whatever he threw, but other times we see him having to run the entire distance from one location to another.
Speaking of running, I don't know if it was just because they ran out of Thomas Newman cues to use for the temp score (American Beauty i think, though honestly every one of Newman's scores from the late 90s/early 00s sound identical to me), but every single time a character had to run in the movie, a rock song would come on. While not bad selections (thankfully, no goddamn Fall Out Boy), again it just got annoying after 3 or 4 times.
The acting is good across the board. Chatwin is likeable and carries the film well, much better than he was in War of the Worlds (though to be fair, he's playing a far more sympathetic character here). Levieva, essentially playing both villain and hero, does a fine job of making you simultaneously hate and root for her.
However, the main problem is this: There is an attempt to make the movie equally about Annie and Nick (both invisible in their own way, get it?), but Annie's story is never as urgent as Nick's is. She isn't in danger of dying, she just has a crappy home life. Perhaps this comes across better in the book, but in the movie, whenever it starts to focus on her breaking free of her past, it loses momentum.
Oddly we were specifically told the visual effects weren't complete, but there weren't any at all (unless you count the camera tricks)? As I said, he never passes through an object, nor does anyone walk through him (on the contrary, people actually go out of their way to avoid him on several occasions). Other than the obvious temp score and a bizarrely cropped shot late in the film, it looked pretty well finished to me, impressive since it just finished shooting in December.
All in all, it's above average for its kind, but Goyer should have passed and done something even better, preferably of his own design. Hopefully it will find its audience and lead to better things for all cast and of course, Goyer himself.
BC
Interesting. It sounds like it’s worth seeing, even with the complaints you have, and I’m curious to find out how early in the testing process the film is right now. Thanks for the review, man.
"Moriarty" out.
