Product Details

• Actors: Julianne Moore, Dominic West, Christopher Kovaleski, Matthew Pleszewicz, Anthony Edwards
• Directors: Joseph Ruben
• Writers: Gerald Di Pego
• Producers: Bruce Cohen, Dan Jinks, Joe Roth, Steve Nicolaides, Todd Garner
• Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 5.1)
• Subtitles: English, French, Chinese, Thai, Korean
• Region: Region 1 encoding (US and Canada only)
  PLEASE NOTE: Some Region 1 DVDs may contain Regional Coding Enhancement (RCE). Some, but not all, of our international customers have had problems playing these enhanced discs on what are called "region-free" DVD players. For more information on RCE, click here.
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
• DVD Release Date: January 18, 2005
• Run Time: 91 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (282 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0006IIKQW
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #21,520 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "The Forgotten" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

With a plot that might've been lifted from The X-Files, nothing is quite what it seems in The Forgotten, a psychological conspiracy thriller with Julianne Moore doing fine work as a grieving mother whose nine-year-old son was killed in a plane crash. At least, that's what she's been led to believe, but when even her husband (Anthony Edwards) tries to convince her that she's delusional and never had a child, things start to get very spooky indeed. Dominic West (from HBO's superb series The Wire) plays a similarly traumatized father, and when they witness some very strange events--and a mysterious man (Linus Roache) who might be indestructible--this glorified B-movie potboiler directed by Joseph Ruben (best known for Dreamscape and The Stepfather) turns into a preposterous but entertaining trip into The Twilight Zone territory. Featuring Alfre Woodard as an intuitive New York detective and Gary Sinise as a seemingly sympathetic psychiatrist, The Forgotten offers adequate shocks and an intriguing, otherworldly study of tenacious parental instinct. It deserved its mixed reviews, but it's a fun spook-fest for rainy-day viewing. --Jeff Shannon

Product Description

Haunted by the memories of a son her husband swears she never had, a distraught mother's search for the truth leads to a mind-shattering conspiracy of unearthly terror.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

116 of 129 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not bad if you first calibrate your expectations, October 3, 2004

By 

Bob Stout (Houston, Texas USA) - See all my reviews

I've heard the critics and I've read the viewer feedback and I'm still scratching my head. The most common thing I've heard was that people expected it to be a different kind of movie and were let down at what it turned out to be. Obviously these people either didn't see the trailer or didn't give it any thought.

The trailer sets up the premise, and the only way someone seeing it could imagine it playing out would be as either: 1) a psychological thriller, 2) an alien abduction movie, 3) a supernatural thriller. Given what's revealed in the trailers, those are pretty much the only options. If you go to the movies often, you probably saw the trailers more than once, in which case it doesn't take any great deductive powers to figure out exactly what it's going to be.

From this point on, there may be spoilers!

OK, a bit more on the trailer(s)... We see that Julianne Moore's character has lost a son and that people around her have apparently forgotten he ever existed. Next we see that pictures have been altered. At this point, the options are still open. Next we see her ripping the wallpaper and revealing to Dominic West's character that he, too, had a child who apparently died. A few moments later, we see her in official custody with him shouting through the window that he remembers. Since we have two people with shared memories of people who weren't supposed to have ever existed, the psychological thriller plot line is eliminated. This has to be some sort of conspiracy, whether supernatural, alien or pod people. The shots in the trailer aren't creepy enough for a supernatural plot, so that pretty much leaves some sort of aliens. Duh!

Knowing this, I went to see it with suitably calibrated expectations. As with all such plots, there were holes and lapses in logic, but surprisingly fewer than I would have expected. Julianne Moore gives a typically excellent performance and the other parts are well cast and performed. I must admit my wife had the nature of Gary Sinese's character nailed while I was still undecided about him.

Altogether, not a great flick, but certainly a lot better than many people have given it credit for. I enjoyed it, my wife stayed awake through it (a major endorsement!), and I left without wishing for my money or 96 minutes back.

47 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars What is forgotten is the great opening story premise, January 25, 2005

By 

Lawrance M. Bernabo (The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Forgotten (DVD)

I got really anxious when I put in the DVD for "The Forgotten" and was given an option of watching the original theatrical release or the extended version with an alternate ending. Given what I knew about this 2004 film, to wit, a mother is the only one who remembers that she had a son, I was worried that the two endings might represents completely opposite resolutions to the situation. Fortunately, that is not the case, and I think the alternate ending is slightly stronger than the original (actually, to a great extent they are pretty compatible). But the proliferation of alternative endings on DVDs worries me, because if you are not sure where your movie is going to end when you start making it I think you are in serious trouble. Besides, I have horrid visions of the alternate endings for "Gone With the Wind" and "Casablanca."

"The Forgotten" is a film with an interesting idea, but the trailer gives away a bit too much so that you have no doubt as to which way you are supposed to be leaning on this one. Telly Paretta (Julianne Moore), has been mourning the death of her 9-year-old son, Sam, for over a year (she can do months, days, and hours). Sam was killed in an airplane crash, along with nine other kids. Telly is seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Munce (Gary Sinise), but resisting treatment, the goal of which is for her to spend less time each day looking at Sam's toys and photographs of the boy. Then she comes home one day and finds everything is gone and her husband, Jim (Anthony Edwards) is insisting she never had a child but had suffered a miscarriage.

The idea of a woman who has created a fictional child who ends up getting killed is rather compelling (even if you are suddenly thinking "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"), but that is not what is going on here. This is one of those movies were a mom, against great odds, fights for her child. Part of the problem with "The Forgotten" is that the odds against which Tally is fighting might be the greatest in human history. While this is also an interesting idea, it is played out against such monumental odds that the point Gerald Di Pego's script is trying to make about the power of a mother's love gets a bit lost.

Tally is able to enlist a couple of allies, Ash Correll (Dominic West), an ex-hockey player who does not remember the daughter Telly insists he had, and Detective Ann Pope (Alfre Woodard), who is suspicious of the feds chasing a crazy women and who finds it hard to believe that two people would be suffering parallel delusions. But the initial flaw in this film is that we know Tally is not crazy from the start and I really believe that ambiguity needs to be a bigger part of the first act of the film. The longer the film cuts both ways, the stronger this sort of story tends to be. But director Joseph Ruben apparently does not recognize this is the smart way to go.

The major flaw with this film is that once we get to THE EXPLANATION as to what is going on, your awe over the sheer magnitude of the power and magnitude of what is going on is mitigated by the simple question of "why go to all the bother?" After all, when you think about the final scene, it sure seems like a bit much for a statistical aberration, and that is without even getting into the whole question of how it is done (not that any explanation would be forthcoming, but you can appreciate the idea).

This is too bad because not only is the idea of a woman inventing a fictional child rather interesting, Moore provides an anguished performance as this particular mother, capturing both the pain of loss and the power of motherhood, and West certainly gives his role a nice little twist from what we have come to expect in such films that throw two people together. But primarily "The Forgotten" is a film that wastes several talented performers. Most of Anthony Edwards scenes are in the trailer, Sinise has to wait most of the film for a scene worthy of his talents, and "The Forgotten" is a movie that literally throws away Alfre Woodward.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Forgotten...best forgotten, February 18, 2005

By 

mrliteral - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Forgotten (DVD)

Poorly written, poorly acted and poorly directed, there is enough in Forgotten to dissatisfy most people.

The movie follows a mother played by Julianne Moore, who is still in mourning over the death of her son a year earlier. This tragic event takes on an extra level of grimness when all records of her son begin to disappear: except for her, no one remembers him, and photos, newspaper articles and other documents no longer prove his existence. Either Moore is crazy or something sinister is going on, and when shadowy government figures get involved, we know it's the latter.

In theory, this could be a good movie, but the story is executed so poorly that its potential quality remains a mere hypothetical. Perhaps the most grating moment comes around a third of the way through the movie, when Moore visits a man who is the father of another child who died, but who cannot remember his daughter. Fortunately, the power responsible for these existence-erasings - a force powerful and intelligent enough to alter minds and documents - just bothered to poorly wallpaper over the girl's room, allowing Moore to expose the conspiracy.

There are other laughable idiocies: the government agents who have no idea how to arrest a person, allowing chases that could have been avoided if they were semi-competent; the police detective who - with little real evidence - easily believes Moore's tale of conspiracy; and so on. Rather than relying on cleverness to move the story along, this movie uses dumbness. In a comedy, this might work, but not in this humorless horror movie. If you feel an urge to watch this film, find an old X-Files or Twilight Zone episode instead. You'll be much happier.