It starts very slow, introducing the three main characters. Friends Nick and Jonah are two MIT students who almost got expelled from school because of an hacker who calls himself Nomad. Nick has a girlfriend, Haley, who’s about to transfer to California for a year. This creates trouble in their relationship because she can feel him distant already. At a stop on their way to California he makes a remark on her not having to worry about him anymore since she’s going away, which sounds like jealousy talk. She tells him she’ll be gone only for a year, and he tells her he doesn’t want to hold her back - because he walks with crutches and thinks he’s a burden to her and refuses her help with anything, like many people he doesn’t understand that what she says it’s true, that she wants to help him because she loves him and is happy to do it, knowing very well that he doesn’t need help, but the fact than he can do anything by himself doesn’t mean that he should! So many can’t or won’t understand that accepting help is not a sign of weakness but of love, sometimes.
I thought this part was rather boring because I didn’t like Nick’s character: he wants to look all mind and no heart but fails miserably and only appear bitter and resentful to me.
Hurt by his words and attitude, feeling like he doesn’t care for her, Haley breaks up with him giving back the necklace with his promises engraved. Since he won’t take it back she throws it away.
The ‘romantic’ part of the movie ends here. Now the tech story begins. Nomad communicates with them on their computer, challenging them. Jonah finds his location and wants to go find him. Haley tells them that they’re making a mistake but Jonah and Nick don’t listen to her, they want to find him, so they stop - at night - at the location the signal is coming from. It looks like an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere, but they enter it anyway leaving Haley alone in the car outside. The house is so obviously empty and abandoned and there’s no sign of people or technology there, but Nick insists on checking it all out. I mean, why? What are they doing? It’s clearly an empty abandoned house, so what’s the point? And if they were expecting to find people there, would it really be ok to enter somebody’s home at night, wandering around from room to room?
I also didn’t like the blair-witch-project-style of those scenes, when suddenly we see it all as if we were Nick’s eyes, seeing only with the help of his flashlight... it went on for too long and I found it irritating, not thrilling. Still, after that, the sci-fi part starts.
They hear Haley’s screams. Both run outside, and find an empty car. They look for her with the help of the flashlight, and suddenly, for a moment, we see Haley flying up... This was the first scene that justified the sci-fi definition of the movie. It was nice, it make me think ‘finally we’re getting to the heart of the story’; unfortunately the next scenes are very very slow again. We see Nick waking up in what could be a hospital or a lab. He’s dressed as a patient, and people around him all wear white lab suits, saying he might have been exposed to something contagious.
Damon (Laurence Fishburne) shows him a video: he watches himself and Jonah at the abandoned house and never asks how they got that video. Damon stops the recording at the image of a tree, where we can clearly see the usual-style-face of an alien. Damon asks him to answer simple questions like Do you have ten fingers? and also asks him to do simple tasks like raising an arm. Nick’s all suspicious and frustrated - even though at first there was no reason - and doesn’t mention at all that they use an old tv screen and a cassette-recorder. Nick only mentions it later when in anger he tells Damon that he’s so out-of-date he’s pathetic and ridiculous.. :-/
Nick’s legs feel now completely numb and useless. He hears Jonah’s voice, he’s apparently in another room in the same facility. Nick asks Damon about Haley, who is now in a coma, but doesn’t get answers. When he asks about Jonah is told that they didn’t find him. Nick makes a weak attempt at escaping bringing Haley with him but of course he fails. Back in his room, Nick discovers that his legs have been replaced by some kind of artificial legs, robotic legs. He can now succeed in breaking out with Haley, but once outside he discovers that they are in a deserted area.
They escape together and find Jonah who also had something done to him: his arms are now robotic. Haley too, in her back it would seem. When they are surrounded by enemies with weapons, Jonah stays behind to help his friends escape, and uses his super-arms on the floor to destroy everything, in a very long scene in slow motion. I don’t know what happens to him. Was he badly hurt already? Does he die?
Anyway, it’s all rather useless because Nick and Haley can’t really escape. Once Nick leaves her alone in a truck and she’s taken away, but he reaches her again. Then they are found and stopped by Damon and his men. An helicopter takes Haley away but not Nick, and Damon challenges him to reach her. Nick uses his superlegs, and during his run he suddenly breaks some kind of barrier that was not visible before. He finds himself in totally different surroundings, but can still see where he was before. Damon shows his head and reveals that he himself is an alien, and tells him that it was his fault, he tracked the signal, he went looking for him. Damon is of course Nomad. They are on a big spaceship, and they have arrived to the alien planet.
The idea was not bad, but the kids story was not good. They were provoked alright, because Nomad almost got them expelled, but they took the bait too easily instead of listening to Haley’s words of wisdom. Their personal relationship were not well developed, and not interesting. A lot of things never got explained, like the fact that the necklace magically reappeared and nobody seemed surprised, that there was a lot of old stuff and nobody found it odd; also, all those people that died, those people talking nonsense.. were they prisoners like the kids, were they aliens playing a part, were they unreal and only part of the illusion? I thought they were prisoners too, but it’s not clear.
The way Nick reacted at first, after he woke up in that strange hospital-like-facility, was not right.
A big problem with the movie I think is with the characters of the kids. Badly written in my opinion.
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