I went and saw...
May. 8th, 2004 05:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
agilebrit"Godsend" this afternoon.
And now I just want to sit here and hold Da Boy.
For those of you unfamiliar with the basic plot, a couple's 8-year-old son dies in a freak accident, and they're approached by a doctor with a proposition. He can give their boy back to them...via cloning. After some angsting about it, they agree.
Wackiness, as they say, ensues. Once the kid turns eight, he starts getting memories of stuff that happened before he was born (back in his "other" life), and other disturbing memories as well. His behavior becomes more and more erratic, and finally the dad confronts the doctor (who has remained on their case this whole time), and dun dun dun...the doc admits that he fooled around with the DNA, and not only does the kid have the couple's boy's DNA, but he's got the doc's dead kid's DNA as well.
Of course, the problem with this is that the doc's kid was the Child From Hell, in that he killed his mother with a hammer and burned down their house, dying in the fire--when he was eight. Why you'd want to bring back a child like this is open to a big fat question, but apparently this supposedly brilliant doctor has a teeny little blind spot when it comes to his kid. And he's got this obsession with bringing him back, to the point of stalking grieving parents at funerals so he can approach them about bringing their child back from the dead, in a manner of speaking. Which is, you know, pretty ghoulish, but hey.
There is no "happily ever after" here. The doctor disappears and sets up shop someplace else, still plying his bizzarro trade, and the parents and the kid move away to a new town to get a fresh start...but of course the memories and whatever ghosts are chasing the boy are still there (they didn't really make it all that clear if the kid was hallucinating or if there really was something evil stalking him).
Plot holes abound, of course. Why did the memories/demons/whatever only start when he was eight? Why didn't the doc's colleagues look at him funny for continuing a relationship with these parents and the kid after the kid was born, since it was just supposed to be a "routine" in-vitro fertilization? How did the dad know where to show up just in time to save his wife from getting hit in the head with an axe? And how did he do that at all, since the last time we saw him, he was unconscious on the floor of a church that was on fire, after this well-respected doctor whacked him on the head with some sort of scepter-looking thing? And why the hell would an 8-year-old child beat his mom to death with a hammer? They never really addressed the "why's" of all this.
All in all...bleh. Two and a half stars. Not going in the DVD collection.
And now I just want to sit here and hold Da Boy.
For those of you unfamiliar with the basic plot, a couple's 8-year-old son dies in a freak accident, and they're approached by a doctor with a proposition. He can give their boy back to them...via cloning. After some angsting about it, they agree.
Wackiness, as they say, ensues. Once the kid turns eight, he starts getting memories of stuff that happened before he was born (back in his "other" life), and other disturbing memories as well. His behavior becomes more and more erratic, and finally the dad confronts the doctor (who has remained on their case this whole time), and dun dun dun...the doc admits that he fooled around with the DNA, and not only does the kid have the couple's boy's DNA, but he's got the doc's dead kid's DNA as well.
Of course, the problem with this is that the doc's kid was the Child From Hell, in that he killed his mother with a hammer and burned down their house, dying in the fire--when he was eight. Why you'd want to bring back a child like this is open to a big fat question, but apparently this supposedly brilliant doctor has a teeny little blind spot when it comes to his kid. And he's got this obsession with bringing him back, to the point of stalking grieving parents at funerals so he can approach them about bringing their child back from the dead, in a manner of speaking. Which is, you know, pretty ghoulish, but hey.
There is no "happily ever after" here. The doctor disappears and sets up shop someplace else, still plying his bizzarro trade, and the parents and the kid move away to a new town to get a fresh start...but of course the memories and whatever ghosts are chasing the boy are still there (they didn't really make it all that clear if the kid was hallucinating or if there really was something evil stalking him).
Plot holes abound, of course. Why did the memories/demons/whatever only start when he was eight? Why didn't the doc's colleagues look at him funny for continuing a relationship with these parents and the kid after the kid was born, since it was just supposed to be a "routine" in-vitro fertilization? How did the dad know where to show up just in time to save his wife from getting hit in the head with an axe? And how did he do that at all, since the last time we saw him, he was unconscious on the floor of a church that was on fire, after this well-respected doctor whacked him on the head with some sort of scepter-looking thing? And why the hell would an 8-year-old child beat his mom to death with a hammer? They never really addressed the "why's" of all this.
All in all...bleh. Two and a half stars. Not going in the DVD collection.
