It would probably be easier to review Steve Berryessa’s film The Forgotten (or Falls The Shadow for its original United States release) by listing all the other films it refers to and tries to emulate rather than actually write something coherent and original. That would, however, be cheating. The Forgotten follows three unrelated twosomes as they try to survive in an America that has been reduced to a barren and hostile wilderness following a war some three years previous of a non-specific type. To further complicate matters there are various infected humans running around all over the place with a taste for human flesh.
Michael (David Eby) is a soldier trying to find his wife and daughter having been away on duty for an undetermined period of time doing undetermined things. When he reaches the family home his father explains his wife was killed by raiders and his daughter taken. As they journey to rescue her they encounter a mother with a seemingly immune son and a couple of unknown origins and together they fight to free Michael’s daughter and end the tyranny of self appointed leader Reverend Phelps (Phil Perry).
This is a film that probably looked a lot better on paper than it does on screen. If you sat down for a weekend and watched a marathon of genre films based around post apocalyptic survival, picked out some of your favourite bits and mixed them all up a bit, you would end up with something similar to The Forgotten. The problem is that all those original elements will have been so much better than the unstructured amalgamation we have here. There is a little bit of the infected from 28 Days Later, but it is never explained why they exist at all. There is something of the Mad Max world thrown in without any of the anarchy and rawness of those originals. The list could go on and on; State Of Emergency, Waterworld, The Walking Dead, and more but The Forgotten has no hint of originality to create its own world and fails badly in comparison with all its sources.
The performances are awkward at best with Eby the worst culprit seemingly trying to pout menacingly throughout. There is little chemistry between the characters, either good or bad, and there feels to be little in the way of threat from the appointed bad guys. The biggest issue though is in some of the politics on display. Berryessa has decided that The Reverend is leading some kind of neo-Nazi cult which is strange in itself as his mission statement appears to be repopulating America so surely he would want as many people as possible regardless of colour or creed? The initial speeches his character is given are distasteful and ill-judged and put the viewer immediately on the defensive towards the film as a whole. Perhaps there is some political statement being made in that the film is set in Southern America but this is very much lost amidst the posturing and ranting.
OVERALL SUMMARY
The Forgotten has taken three years to travel from America for its UK release and I suspect this is related to struggling to find a distributor. This is poor film with questionable ideas set against a mosaic background of much better films.
