Ah yes, the 2000s – where horror remakes were plentiful and a fair few of them failed to match the original. Regardless of your personal feelings concerning genre do-overs that saw everyone from celebrated horror icons to the killer from Prom Night getting shiny new reduxes, the glut of J-Horror that were getting American remakes proved to be fairly alarming.
I’ll freely admit that Gore Verbinski’s take on Hideo Nakata’s Ringu stands as a genuinely great example of an English language remake that builds and expands on the original, but in its wake came more and more examples of varying quality. The Grudge, Dark Water, Pulse, The Uninvited, Shutter (although that one’s technically Thai) – it seemed that rather than trying to get western audiences to watch movies with subtitles, it was just easier to remake them completely. One such example was The Eye, a 2008 offering that reworked the 2003 movie helmed by the Pang Brothers – but even without a superior, Japanese original lurking in the shadows, hadn’t we all seen the “I see dead people” trope before?
Sydney Wells may have been blind since the age of five, but that hasn’t stopped her from forging her own path as a classical violinist of some repute. However, as her sister, Helen, still feels immense guilt over the firecracker incident that cost her sibling her sight, she’s pushed for Sydney to have a cornea transplant in order to finally restore her vision. However, after the operation, Sydney still needs to undergo a whole bunch of tests and training in order to get used to her new peepers as things like perspective and depth perception are all completely alien to her.
It helps that intense, but dashing, visual therapist, Paul Faulkner is walking her through it all as her blurry vision gradually starts to clear, but soon Sydney starts to realise that there’s something weird going on with her eyesight than just those little floaty bits of schmutz you get on the peripheral of your vision. No, She’s seeing whole, shadowy, people wandering through rooms, or strange people lurking in the halls of her apartment building and while everyone tells her that it’s just her new eyes acclimatising, Sydney soon starts to suspect that the truth may be more creepier than anyone could dream of. Simply put, Sydney’s seeing ghosts and the shadowy beings that shepherd them to the other side, and in order to find out how to stop this phenomenon, she embarks on a mission to discover just whose eyes she recieved in the transplant.
However, on a trip with Paul to Mexico to figure out the truth, Sydney starts to discover that there’s more to her new sight than just spotting the dead loitering around her neighbourhood like transparent transients. There’s a chance that those tricked out eyeballs can also see into the near future, and if that’s the case, what are Sydney’s eyes really trying to show her?
To be honest, I still haven’t gotten around to actually seeing the Pang Brothers’ original The Eye at time of writing, but I have to believe that it’s better than this decidedly flat remake that doesn’t seem to want to actually go anywhere. Directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud, the two dudes responsible for unnerving, French, home-invasion-movie-with-a-twist, Them, we find yet another glossy retread that has absolutely nothing new to say, from it’s distinctly 2000s editing style, to its The Sixth Sense-lite leanings. It’s odd, because the main feature of Them was its subtle nature to deliver an atmospheric, bloodless feature right slap bang in the middle if the French Extreme New Wave; but with The Eye, such talents have presumably deserted them as each ghost encounter is accompanied by glaring attempts at jump scares and unnecessary swooshing sounds on the soundtrack.
Its odd, because the premise is loaded with promise and if someone had taken the original and delivered something less mindlessly flashy, we might have had an American ghost film to rival M. Night Shyamalan’s legendary classic. But instead the film we find it’s constantly taking the easy, lazier option and as a result, ends up thieving liberally from a bunch of other movies. There’s the premonition of disaster that you’d get in Final Destination, the shadowy, between-world beings we saw in Ghost and lashings of those moments you get in poorly written haunting movies where the ghost-in-need inexplicably keeps kicking the living shit out of the well-meaning heroine despite desperately needing their help. But beyond this, The Eye continues to insist on doing itself no favours whatsoever as its fairly vanilla cast flounders among overfamilar roles that offers precious few surprises in a film that should be loaded with them.
Jessica Alba has always been one of the more easy-on-the-eyes performers to come out of Hollywood, but when required to tackle being blind, being a violinist, or even being scared, she just doesn’t have the chops to portray someone whose life has has literally just turned insane (Regaining sight and discovering proof of the afterlife in under a week?! Are you crazy?!). However, while the movie gives her some cool, Matt Murdock tricks to play with – why are blind people in films so good at stopping people from getting run over? – the film fails to really burrow into the notion that Sydney regaining her sight actually makes her far weaker than she was before. In fact, in a film that suggests that having an eye transplant could somehow make you hear ghosts too, by far the most far fetched thing in this movie is that someone thought that we’d buy Jessica Alba and Parker Posey as sisters. It’s telling that the normally memorable Posey virtually disapates into the background almost as completely as those smoky, wraith things that seem needlessly vicious despite doing such a seemingly benevolent task as shepherding spirits to the afterlife. Elsewhere we find Alessandro Nivola dutifully earning his paycheck, an early, pre-Kick-Ass role for Chloë Grace Moretz, and a final act trip south of the border brings in Total Recall’s Rachel Ticotin. But what doesn’t get brought in are scares, tension, or even a vague feeling of interest as the movie approaches a twist that’s about as surprising as finding feathers on a duck.
As one of the worst that the J-Horror remakes have to offer, you truly wonder what the point was. I mean, you’ve accumulated all this talent to badly redo a movie that didn’t actually need a remake in the first place and as a result of this soulless cash grab, all you’ve really achieved is to scratch some of the respectability off of the original.
Yet another American J-Horror remake manages to messily blur all the good parts of the original, while producing a version that is painfully pointless in virtually every way. The fact that the people behind this couldn’t see how much of an unnecessary venture it is proves to be all the more ironic.
Should’ve gone to spook-savers…
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