Force Fed Films: "Mothman Prophecies" (2002)

 Jim gave me an interesting choice to watch today. I don’t know much about “Mothman Prophecies” but just from the title I was intrigued. Sadly this movie stars Richard Gere, an actor who I despise because he reeks of mediocrities like how teenage boys reek of terrible AXE body spray. But a terrible actor can’t bring down an entire film as long as the film is good, right? Well, I can’t be the judge of that, wait yes I can … that’s the whole point. Anyways, more on why this movie takes a jump forward but than 7 steps back.



After losing his wife to a brain tumour 2 years ago, John Klein (Gere) ends up in Point Pleasant, West Virginia where strange things are happening to its residents. The towns people are seeing supernatural events with a moth shaped man, strangley enough Klein’s wife was seeing the same monster before she passed away. Thinking there is a connection with these people and his wife, he needs to get to the bottom of this before things truly get out of control.

The movie walks along a thin line where one side is an amazing movie and the other is just plain annoying. When it does one thing well, it’ll drop the ball on a few other things. For an example, the story I found was the core of my enjoyment. It’s interesting, even though it wasn’t too outlandish. And because the story was solid, it helped the suspense fell all too real. Even though these might have been the only entertaining part of the movie, it really kept the movie from being terrible.

Is Gordon going crazy or does he really see the Mothman?

Now the bad, and there is a lot of bad parts, but they aren’t too terrible. It stems from the problem that they tried to fit a lot of content in only 2 hours. It almost felt rushed and cut out what I felt, were some solid transitions. It was juggling Klein’s relationship with his late wife, Point Pleasant’s unexplainable events, Gordon’s hysteria and the Mothman himself. But there was no real smooth transition from any of the side stories. Sometimes it felt the movie didn’t know where it wanted to go and how to develop on that. This is what disrupts the suspenseful mood.

But a the real turn off is the lack of the Mothman. The first part of the movie does a great job of building an idea of the Mothman being this mysterious force that is evil and is out to get you. And almost immediately drops all the facts on who he is and what he is doing. You can’t have any suspense when you know it all. And once that is gone, we never hear from him ever again. He was such a great creature, why did they drop him? This sort of brings back the point that the movie is just disorganized.

And again, they have a great investigating portion of the movie where Klein and the local officer are trying to explain all the mysterious sightings. It is going well, builds up a great deal of suspense and it sort of disappears. Because the moment his dead wife comes back to the real realm, they drop the investigating and go back to dealing with his dead wife. And these aren’t the only times, it seems like the movie does that a lot with almost everything else. It’s a shame really. Thankfully the movie does end with a decent enough ending.

We'll get to the bottom of this! But wait my wife is here.

And the last real complaint is that the movie isn't really that scary. There is a handful of scenes that try to spook you silly, but they seem almost badly timed and placed awkwardly in the movie. To elaborate, they only appear during the times the movie isn't dealing with the scary creature. The writer must of thought to put in a few scenes to shake people up and placed them where there was any scene that were lacking any true value. At least  that is how I felt.

The director must have wrote the 4 or 5 topics he wanted to deal with in this movie on pieces of paper, put them in a hat and drew them out randomly. And because of that, the movie feels rushed, incomplete and disorganized. Potentially this movie could have been a great horror and thriller; it had all the right pieces just never placed in any coherent order. Thankfully enough, Gere wasn’t the reason I hated this movie, he was good and surprisingly enough I liked him the most.