Some movies have lessons. "The Eye" teaches us that human beings have souls, which are taken away by CGI ghosts after death. Sometimes when people die, they can haunt the living, but only if they keep their chins tucked into their necks, looking up only with their eyes. Mexican women may or may not possess magic and can warn people of horrible tragedies, but never in English. Also, being blind is awesome, and people shouldn't mess with eye transplants or stem cell research.
"The Eye" stars Jessica Alba, who plays Sidney, a blind but sexy twenty-year-old concert violinist with excellent health insurance. Cut to Sidney adeptly navigating her nondescript metropolis and saving local youth from being hit by oncoming traffic. "Whoa thanks, I didn't even see that," exclaims the youth. "Neither did I," Sidney replies with a smile. After showing us that Sidney's life as a blind woman is pretty good, we find out that Sidney is going in for surgery.
Her door man recommends that she drink sherry the night before, and so she reaches past several bottles of champagne, and, grasping the cooking sherry, proceeds to take a polite swig.
That's just the sort of girl she is: easily influenced, scared and unsure of the difference between cooking sherry and drinkable sherry. The difference between this film and all of its Japanese predecessors ("Ju-On"(2000) and "Ringu"(1998)) is much like the difference between sherry and cooking sherry. Yes, it will take up time, and the real thing is much smoother, but many people can't tell the difference.
After surgery, everything through Sidney's eyes is blurry, and she has a hard time adjusting to her new sight. The film wastes a lot of time waiting for Sidney's eyes to adjust to the light, while it would have been much easier to just cut to when Sidney could see pretty well. Most of the audience understands the premise of seeing supernatural beings, and the 30 minutes or so spent coyly playing with the "is it real?" idea was not enjoyable.
There are also scenes that add nothing to the plot, such as a party with her friends that all re-introduce themselves in order to match up their voices with faces. Admittedly, this was interesting, and had it been a documentary on people seeing for the first time, it might have had more significance. Soon, Sidney begins seeing "shadows", which escort the souls of the dead somewhere, most likely into a Patrick Swayze-filled afterlife. They give distorted screeches when Sidney looks at them, which begins to freak her out. Clearly, Sidney was having trouble adjusting: enter the hip, sexy doctor, Paul.
Paul runs some eye tests and determines that Sidney's eyes are normal, but very sexy. Paul then employs the well-known medical techniques of yelling, grabbing both of her arms, and telling her that they just aren't real. After exhausting everything he could think to do, Paul decides to listen to her.
So Sidney and Paul embark on figuring out whose sexy eyes she has inherited in an effort to find out why these visions persist. What magical being could possess such eyes that allow Jessica Alba to see the dead? There is of course a twist to Sidney's new eyes, one that is entirely unoriginal and completely predictable. While it is a worthwhile trip to the movies to see such beautiful actors, the plot, acting and direction leave much to be desired and make this another run-of-the-mill, CGI-driven horror movie.
