I don’t want to spend too much time trying to put my thoughts on this film into words, mostly because I already can’t wait to watch it again. I love that the first act is basically the Matheson story, which is enjoyable and Twilight Zone-y, but then, having run out of source material, Kelly just goes completely off the rails. I know some people complain about his return to water imagery for no particular reason (or, rather, for reasons he’s not really capable of coherently explaining to people with words), but I am very fond of Kelly’s complete unwillingness to compromise. I am honestly stunned (but pleased) that he’s able to convince anyone to give him money to make these movies.

Actually, I know I said I wanted to not get into this too much, but there’s one aspect of the movie that, combined with some of my TV viewing earlier in the week, I kind of want to get down before I forget it. There’s really no particular reason for this movie to be set in the 70’s, except that people of our age (I’m a little less than two months younger than Kelly) seem have a very weird relationship to the era of our childhood. Unless I’m forgetting something, our generation seems to be the first to regard our childhood less with nostalgia than with dread. We don’t seem to be producing a lot of Stand by Me sorts of films, but we do seem perfectly willing to use our childhoods as a source of terror, confusion, and general unearthliness (with my immediate examples here being not only this film, but also the queasy archival footage of the Dharma Initiative on Lost and the day care center/experimental facility on Fringe). I mean, I’m sure viewing the adult world as confusing and scary as a child is a fairly universal experience, but I am wondering whether the adult culture of the United States in the 70’s was a little more confusing and scary than that which came before or after. I have weird, dim memories of shows (news reports?) about faces manifesting in data coming from the stars that continue to perplex me to this day, and clearly Abrams (who, admittedly, is a little old for this theory, so maybe credit should go to Lindelof, Orci, and Kurztman) and Kelly have similar issues. I don’t really get the sense that generations earlier or later have these kind of feelings about their childhoods, and I have no idea how viewers older or younger than me respond to these elements, but I can say that they certainly resonate well with me.