(spoilers herein) The basic plot of They involves three characters who delve into the world of nocturnal, computer-generated monsters, whose behavior is conveniently explained through their friend's journal, which they carry with them like some sort of talisman against being killed by these things. The basic premise leading to the `scary' part of the movie is the fact that darkness evidently opens up some sort of portal between our world and their world, whatever that world may be. I like that the movie taps into the uproar surrounding the rolling blackouts that were going on around the time that the movie was released. Unfortunately, as in real life, the rolling blackouts are quickly forgotten in the movie and, very soon, the scariness behind the story expires.
The main character, Julia, is a psychology student (very fitting, as we soon find out) preparing to deliver her thesis when a friend chooses that as the best time to reveal to her that unseen creatures are coming to kill him, and then they'll be after her, too. He informs her that she's next, her childhood night terrors return, and thus the formula has been administered. The creatures to which the title refers are never revealed very clearly, and I'm actually not really sure if we're supposed to just see blurs of their true forms or if they are really just shaped like inkblots or something, but the important thing is that they're supposed to be big and mean and scary. Sadly, they're not. They're big and mean, yes, but that third characteristic is really rather important in this genre.
The movie has a few redeeming moments, I suppose but the movie is peppered with simply bad scenes, scares that are such a horror cliché that they come off as completely contrived and boring, like when someone tells you the same joke for the 40th time. You get a little tired of hearing it, you know? There are, for example, FAR too many scenes where characters wander off into the dark alone and we're supposed to grab the edge of our seats wondering what in the world is going to happen to them. There's a scene, for example, where Julia leaves the safety of her boyfriend's house and heads straight for a deserted subway station in the middle of the night. Brilliant. Wasn't she paying attention to her friend when he told her the creatures were coming for her? Has she been daydreaming through the whole movie so far?
This lack of creativity is actually partially justified later in the film, when it turns out that everything could be happening just in her head (hence the relevance of her being a student of psychology). The reason the creatures never ate her or anything was because, apparently, she had been imagining them, so to speak. Although, to be fair, he conjuring of these things was a result of slightly more than imagination. I think it was something more along the lines of paranoid schizophrenia, but that raises yet another problem. The ending presents her fear partly as a result of an ability to conceptualize perfectly normal life, which is not true of paranoid schizophrenia. One of the old adages is that people with true, serious mental illnesses like paranoid schizophrenia are not aware that anything is wrong (this is even pointed out in a Megadeth song, with the lyrics "If I know I'm going crazy, I must not be insane"). Multiple personalities are not aware of each other, for example. Madness is loosely defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. In the movie, Julia is very aware of what is going wrong and very aware of the safe world that she is trying to return to.
The storyline is hardly original, obviously, but given the ham-handed and uncreative insertion of mental illness into the story, the ending is made even worse than you might have thought while sitting through this thing. Since everything is in Julia's head, she's left to be, I don't know, eternally knocked down by hideous beasts that never seem to do her any real harm. That could possibly simply be the state of her madness, but that leads to a depth beyond what should really be expected from a PG-13 horror film. An alternate ending puts the entire film inside her head, with everyone else in the film simply being other patients in the hospital, and she has created this world involving them. The subtitles in this ending are simply weak writing though, and I suspect are the reason that this ending is alternate.
They is a film that routinely reflects the creativeness of its title, plodding through every horror movie cliché in the book and spouting cheap scares between every scene. The movie is ironically more famous for being meaninglessly connected to Wes Craven than it is for anything that happens in it, which is a bad sign for the movie and a bad sign for Wes. I've read a lot about the movie and have yet to come across any reason for why the alternate title is `Wes Craven Presents: They,' other than a mention that the theatrical release generated disappointing box office numbers, so they connected his name to increase interest in the movie. Sadly, what little interest it gained was from people who watched the movie and wondered at how a horror veteran like Wes Craven would have willingly attached his name to this. That's like Bill Gates `presenting' a box that some kid threw together and called a computer.
The main character, Julia, is a psychology student (very fitting, as we soon find out) preparing to deliver her thesis when a friend chooses that as the best time to reveal to her that unseen creatures are coming to kill him, and then they'll be after her, too. He informs her that she's next, her childhood night terrors return, and thus the formula has been administered. The creatures to which the title refers are never revealed very clearly, and I'm actually not really sure if we're supposed to just see blurs of their true forms or if they are really just shaped like inkblots or something, but the important thing is that they're supposed to be big and mean and scary. Sadly, they're not. They're big and mean, yes, but that third characteristic is really rather important in this genre.
The movie has a few redeeming moments, I suppose but the movie is peppered with simply bad scenes, scares that are such a horror cliché that they come off as completely contrived and boring, like when someone tells you the same joke for the 40th time. You get a little tired of hearing it, you know? There are, for example, FAR too many scenes where characters wander off into the dark alone and we're supposed to grab the edge of our seats wondering what in the world is going to happen to them. There's a scene, for example, where Julia leaves the safety of her boyfriend's house and heads straight for a deserted subway station in the middle of the night. Brilliant. Wasn't she paying attention to her friend when he told her the creatures were coming for her? Has she been daydreaming through the whole movie so far?
This lack of creativity is actually partially justified later in the film, when it turns out that everything could be happening just in her head (hence the relevance of her being a student of psychology). The reason the creatures never ate her or anything was because, apparently, she had been imagining them, so to speak. Although, to be fair, he conjuring of these things was a result of slightly more than imagination. I think it was something more along the lines of paranoid schizophrenia, but that raises yet another problem. The ending presents her fear partly as a result of an ability to conceptualize perfectly normal life, which is not true of paranoid schizophrenia. One of the old adages is that people with true, serious mental illnesses like paranoid schizophrenia are not aware that anything is wrong (this is even pointed out in a Megadeth song, with the lyrics "If I know I'm going crazy, I must not be insane"). Multiple personalities are not aware of each other, for example. Madness is loosely defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. In the movie, Julia is very aware of what is going wrong and very aware of the safe world that she is trying to return to.
The storyline is hardly original, obviously, but given the ham-handed and uncreative insertion of mental illness into the story, the ending is made even worse than you might have thought while sitting through this thing. Since everything is in Julia's head, she's left to be, I don't know, eternally knocked down by hideous beasts that never seem to do her any real harm. That could possibly simply be the state of her madness, but that leads to a depth beyond what should really be expected from a PG-13 horror film. An alternate ending puts the entire film inside her head, with everyone else in the film simply being other patients in the hospital, and she has created this world involving them. The subtitles in this ending are simply weak writing though, and I suspect are the reason that this ending is alternate.
They is a film that routinely reflects the creativeness of its title, plodding through every horror movie cliché in the book and spouting cheap scares between every scene. The movie is ironically more famous for being meaninglessly connected to Wes Craven than it is for anything that happens in it, which is a bad sign for the movie and a bad sign for Wes. I've read a lot about the movie and have yet to come across any reason for why the alternate title is `Wes Craven Presents: They,' other than a mention that the theatrical release generated disappointing box office numbers, so they connected his name to increase interest in the movie. Sadly, what little interest it gained was from people who watched the movie and wondered at how a horror veteran like Wes Craven would have willingly attached his name to this. That's like Bill Gates `presenting' a box that some kid threw together and called a computer.