Things I've learned from 'The Broken' (spoilers)

Top marks to everyone in this thread who gave me a giggle. Dimagic isn't one of them.

You tell us that we need to think symbolically to understand the movie? Is that so? If a person doesn't get a movie, or appreciate it first time round, chances are the movie didnt explain itself very well.

This movie provides no explanation for what occurs, and does have plot holes like point madnsue makes in this hilarious thread. The explanation behind many events in this film is nothing except horror convention. Which just isnt good enough.

"Frankenstein was creator,not the monster.A common misconception held by all truly stupid people"

"Randy" was just trying to have a little fun, lighten up things a bit on the message boards.

...telling me "people got used to horror with blood, gore and strong violence, so they always need such thrills to be delivered to them.
The Broken requires from viewers to use imagination"

Most of my favoured movies aren't horror films. My top 3 would be something like "Eternal Sunshine...", "Memento" and "Waking Ned Devine". I don't need blood, I don't need explanations directed at grade schoolers - with puppets - to understand a movie.

But there is a difference between not explaining everything and not explaining anything. The Broken is the latter. It explains nothing. For me to use my imagination and fill the gaps would be doing ALL THE WORK. Between the generic bullsh*t that is the premise of the film (horror with mirrors, how original) and the carbon copy that is the twist ending, I'd have to make up EVERY OTHER GOD DAMN THING. Motivations, explanations. I could just save the $10 and make up my own bad horror film. And in fact, I should've just done that, at then Lena Headey would've made out with the other girl.

And, Mr. or Mrs. Artsy Pants, this movie is NOT abstract. You must be one of them people standing in front of a picture where the "painter" just urinated on a canvas, analyzing the sh*t out of it.

to dimagic,



It seems you know a little bit too much about this doppelganger life...you sure you don't come from the mirror world???!!!

What I've learned from this message board is that people will use a lack of imagination on the *viewer's* part to defend a *writer's* ACTUAL lack of imagination. This movie failed to present a mythology at all, and the symbolism is all in the heads of film students who were trying to make a flat film more interesting through the use of a mental exercise, unlike Stay or Mulholland Drive where if you pay close attention and think you can see the symbolism quite easily--it was intended by the director and writer and laid in quite smoothly from the start.

The audience is not responsible for making a movie interesting with their imagination. If we were, we'd be better off just staying home and practicing lucid dreaming. Your defense of this film is as flimsy as old voile. Sure, it had a great cast, avoided cliches, and presented a very creepy atmosphere, but complaining about the audience being too stupid and lazy to understand how LOFTY and how BRILLIANT was its epic SYMBOLISM is a whole lot of pretentious nonsense. Blaming the victim, even.

If you still think I'm wrong, then please feel free to correct me with a detailed analysis of all these amazing layers of symbolism that my neanderthal brain is supposedly missing. And then, do explain why you think the average person should have understood what you did.

No, this is not a movie for those with any imagination...I, for one, figured out the entire plot as soon as they flash-cut from her in the apartment to her Cherokee firing up. Someone with an imagination also might start wondering about ideas that are clearly outside this movie's province; for example, whether all these bodies piling up might at some point become an inconvenience. It's rather fortunate that the dad's doppelganger finally showed up to eliminate him just as someone was alerting him to one of those self-same bodies, in fact.