The whole movie is basically a sister blaming her brother for things he isn't guilty of. A vapid family drama instead of a thrilling supernatural story. Oprah goes horror. Or horror goes to Oprah.
Still, it's worth perhaps for the idiotic "Giiirlllll!" scene. That's funny, though it isn't intended to be.
Starts off nicely enough though, building up mystery, but after the first third you start realizing that the supernatural aspect of the plot is going to be stuck in a rut for at least another 40-50 minutes while the focus shifts then stays on friggin' family drama tedium.
It's similar to one of those annoying "nobody believes me" movies, kind of like a more ambitious hence less cliche version of "Invaders From Mars", in which nobody believes a child that Martians are up to no good - because he is just a kid. Like the drunk hobo nobody believes, in some other cheesy UFO film. Harry has had something done to him by the ocean, a creature, aliens... whatever: just like to his father who was killed by it a little earlier. Yet nobody, not even Harry, knows that he's a victim.
Yet, he is the victim, but everyone else considers him irresponsible, volatile, needlessly hostile...
Needlessly? To give you an idea how contrived this molest-the-innocent-victim shtick gets, consider the fact that his sister ("the nice one") blames HIM for instigating a brawl at their father's funeral, when in fact Harry was provoked by a sociopath who blamed him loudly in front of everyone for killing his father. Yet, Harry gets arrested, nothing happens to the psycho. And Harry is blamed for the incident.
Dumber still, his second sister, Jen (the egotistical, evil one) keeps provoking him yet when he lashes out (and not even in a big way) the "nice sister" blames HIM for provoking Jen. So yes, this writer is laying it on a little too thick. He is basically doing a Hitchcock: the overrated chubster loved to inject his dumb overrated thrillers with this kind of "innocent guy being crushed to the ground" nonsense. Newsflash: that kind of drivel is neither original, nor interesting, nor fun, nor realistic. It's just plain fake, far-fetched.
For a moment there I thought he was going to be blamed for the tons of dead fish, too. "Yeah, Harry must've done it! He is so VIOLENT, killed his father, he is up to no good, I bet HE killed 1000s of those poor fish too!" Well, if this were a Hitchcock film that would have likely followed next, literally. There would have been a lynching mob chasing Harry. So no, it's not as bad as a Hitchcock film but it's still annoying.
Of course, very conveniently this thing is happening only to Harry! There are thousands of fish getting washed up the shore, all victims of the mysterious menace just as Harry is, yet somehow only Harry of all human islanders has this problem. Was the writer more interested in the mediocre drama aspect of this story than the interesting side, the supernatural side? You bet. Why did he think that family drama can be more interesting - in a HORROR film - than the fantasy stuff? Because he is clueless.
So, knowing that I was going to have to sit through at least another half-hour of this kind of repetitive, unrealistic rubbish, I lost interest in the film.
Plus, I could just TELL that this was going to be one of those films that don't try to explain anything. "2001" didn't explain much, because it didn't need to. It's a cerebral movie about ideas. This premise, however, is too specific and banal (as opposed to vague and profound) to not owe us some kind of more concrete explanation. Basically, some "power" in the ocean has turned Harry into a zombie who brings him food from the land. Yes, it's that dumb. May be original, but it's silly, especially without any explanation. We don't even know whether it's an animal, an alien, the ocean itself.
Seriously, the way this super-powerful "creature"/alien feeds is hilarious: it hypnotizes a random fisherman, gets him to bring "exotic" food (deer, dogs and little girls are like oysters and octopus to us), then he LIFTS everything into the air, and the food drops... into the water and... into its mouth? This should have been a comedy. A Lovecraftian comedy. Maybe it's just about a huge Octopus God too lazy to get its own food so it uses its talent at hypnosis to get some free exotic grub. Or maybe it's just the Roman god Neptune pranking a whole island, for MTV.
Speaking of falling from a large height back onto the deck of a boat, it isn't clear at all how Harry managed to survive such a fall. Nor do we understand the "nice" sister's boundless stupidity, when she gets agitated by the reclusive guy asking her whether Harry is killing and transporting animals. Literally that day she'd found out he abducted a dog, and she knew about the deer. So she's an imbecile?
Instead of focusing on the ocean - where the answer must lie - we get brain-scans, sibling drama, a cop angrily shouting at Harry, and other filmic debris more suitable for an Oprah bomb.
There's also the stupid thing his nice sister says, before the problems started. "He tends to get paranoid." This makes little sense, in light of how he was introduced to us in his very first scene: he was shown being annoyed and bored by his conspiracy-theory friend, which a paranoid person would not do. Sloppy writing much? Don't define a character right off the bat as anti-paranoid - but then get a character who is the "voice of reason" (his nice sister) to claim the total opposite just 10 minutes later. Sometimes I wonder how writers can miss out on such gaping holes of logic in their own scripts...
In the end, instead of giving us a viable explanation, the film throws at us a really dumb plot-twist - that Harry and the others were like specimen taken for "study" by... whatever, whoever. An alien? Maybe a really lazy alien that can't be bothered to just pick up its own damn specimen.
No, it's not a profound analogy (between fish and humans as specimen for study), it's Pythonesque. And no amount of "eerie music" can change this.
There's no explanation whatsoever for how the 1000s of dead fish are connected to the "sea creature". Is "the monster" studying fish too? It needs thousands of fish of the same species to analyze - but only one or two humans? Besides, being a sea creature (?) he should already know enough about fish...
Still, it's worth perhaps for the idiotic "Giiirlllll!" scene. That's funny, though it isn't intended to be.
Starts off nicely enough though, building up mystery, but after the first third you start realizing that the supernatural aspect of the plot is going to be stuck in a rut for at least another 40-50 minutes while the focus shifts then stays on friggin' family drama tedium.
It's similar to one of those annoying "nobody believes me" movies, kind of like a more ambitious hence less cliche version of "Invaders From Mars", in which nobody believes a child that Martians are up to no good - because he is just a kid. Like the drunk hobo nobody believes, in some other cheesy UFO film. Harry has had something done to him by the ocean, a creature, aliens... whatever: just like to his father who was killed by it a little earlier. Yet nobody, not even Harry, knows that he's a victim.
Yet, he is the victim, but everyone else considers him irresponsible, volatile, needlessly hostile...
Needlessly? To give you an idea how contrived this molest-the-innocent-victim shtick gets, consider the fact that his sister ("the nice one") blames HIM for instigating a brawl at their father's funeral, when in fact Harry was provoked by a sociopath who blamed him loudly in front of everyone for killing his father. Yet, Harry gets arrested, nothing happens to the psycho. And Harry is blamed for the incident.
Dumber still, his second sister, Jen (the egotistical, evil one) keeps provoking him yet when he lashes out (and not even in a big way) the "nice sister" blames HIM for provoking Jen. So yes, this writer is laying it on a little too thick. He is basically doing a Hitchcock: the overrated chubster loved to inject his dumb overrated thrillers with this kind of "innocent guy being crushed to the ground" nonsense. Newsflash: that kind of drivel is neither original, nor interesting, nor fun, nor realistic. It's just plain fake, far-fetched.
For a moment there I thought he was going to be blamed for the tons of dead fish, too. "Yeah, Harry must've done it! He is so VIOLENT, killed his father, he is up to no good, I bet HE killed 1000s of those poor fish too!" Well, if this were a Hitchcock film that would have likely followed next, literally. There would have been a lynching mob chasing Harry. So no, it's not as bad as a Hitchcock film but it's still annoying.
Of course, very conveniently this thing is happening only to Harry! There are thousands of fish getting washed up the shore, all victims of the mysterious menace just as Harry is, yet somehow only Harry of all human islanders has this problem. Was the writer more interested in the mediocre drama aspect of this story than the interesting side, the supernatural side? You bet. Why did he think that family drama can be more interesting - in a HORROR film - than the fantasy stuff? Because he is clueless.
So, knowing that I was going to have to sit through at least another half-hour of this kind of repetitive, unrealistic rubbish, I lost interest in the film.
Plus, I could just TELL that this was going to be one of those films that don't try to explain anything. "2001" didn't explain much, because it didn't need to. It's a cerebral movie about ideas. This premise, however, is too specific and banal (as opposed to vague and profound) to not owe us some kind of more concrete explanation. Basically, some "power" in the ocean has turned Harry into a zombie who brings him food from the land. Yes, it's that dumb. May be original, but it's silly, especially without any explanation. We don't even know whether it's an animal, an alien, the ocean itself.
Seriously, the way this super-powerful "creature"/alien feeds is hilarious: it hypnotizes a random fisherman, gets him to bring "exotic" food (deer, dogs and little girls are like oysters and octopus to us), then he LIFTS everything into the air, and the food drops... into the water and... into its mouth? This should have been a comedy. A Lovecraftian comedy. Maybe it's just about a huge Octopus God too lazy to get its own food so it uses its talent at hypnosis to get some free exotic grub. Or maybe it's just the Roman god Neptune pranking a whole island, for MTV.
Speaking of falling from a large height back onto the deck of a boat, it isn't clear at all how Harry managed to survive such a fall. Nor do we understand the "nice" sister's boundless stupidity, when she gets agitated by the reclusive guy asking her whether Harry is killing and transporting animals. Literally that day she'd found out he abducted a dog, and she knew about the deer. So she's an imbecile?
Instead of focusing on the ocean - where the answer must lie - we get brain-scans, sibling drama, a cop angrily shouting at Harry, and other filmic debris more suitable for an Oprah bomb.
There's also the stupid thing his nice sister says, before the problems started. "He tends to get paranoid." This makes little sense, in light of how he was introduced to us in his very first scene: he was shown being annoyed and bored by his conspiracy-theory friend, which a paranoid person would not do. Sloppy writing much? Don't define a character right off the bat as anti-paranoid - but then get a character who is the "voice of reason" (his nice sister) to claim the total opposite just 10 minutes later. Sometimes I wonder how writers can miss out on such gaping holes of logic in their own scripts...
In the end, instead of giving us a viable explanation, the film throws at us a really dumb plot-twist - that Harry and the others were like specimen taken for "study" by... whatever, whoever. An alien? Maybe a really lazy alien that can't be bothered to just pick up its own damn specimen.
No, it's not a profound analogy (between fish and humans as specimen for study), it's Pythonesque. And no amount of "eerie music" can change this.
There's no explanation whatsoever for how the 1000s of dead fish are connected to the "sea creature". Is "the monster" studying fish too? It needs thousands of fish of the same species to analyze - but only one or two humans? Besides, being a sea creature (?) he should already know enough about fish...