What Lies Beneath?

What is a ghost? Movie What Lies Beneath tells us a ghost is the spirit of a dead who wants to take revenge on the one who murders it. This movie gets a great cast, that are the Oscar-nominated Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer, and the Oscar winner director Robert Zemeckis. However, it turns out to be a common ghost story. With a great cast to create a terrified atmosphere but a typical plot, I am going to argue that this movie is not an outstanding one.

There is a great star in this movie, Michelle Pfeiffer, who performs well in this movie. Pfeiffer plays the wife of Dr. Spencer, Claire. Dr. Spencer has an affair and finally he kills his lover. Gradually, Clair finds out the truth. Dr. Spencer has to kill her as well. Pfeiffer successfully gets hold of the thrilling emotion towards his husband, as well as the ghost which is actually the spirit of her husband’s lover. From her face, we can easily feel the fear from Pfeiffer, hence, we get fear ourselves!

Apart from Pfeiffer, the atmosphere of this movie is also good. This movie uses sound effect greatly. With breathing and sound from walking, the exciting atmosphere is produced. Every step the character walks, our hearts beat. Sound of breathing of the characters is even thrilling. Waiting for the ghost to appear in unbearable, and the breathing pushes the atmosphere to its forefront. The director successfully creates a tense atmosphere, which is vital for ghost films.

Although it gets a good actress and a good director, the movie gets a disastrous screenplay which devastates the movie. The story is badly written. The first forty-five minutes of the movie, frankly, is nonsense. This part narrates Claire’s thought towards the ghost. At first, she thinks that the ghost haunted in her house is her neighbour, Mary. She sees Mary cry terribly. Then she notices some  strange behaviour of Mary’s husband, which makes her believe that Mary has been murdered by her own husband. However, all turns out to be wrong. She has mistaken. This part, actually, can divert the attention of the audiences. But the screenplay writer cannot organize it well. I just feel that it loses the cohesion to the other half of the movie. In my opinion, adding this part aims at lengthening the movie, so that it can reach two hours long. But it cannot enrich the movie, only devastates it.

Apart from the irrelevant story line, some plots of this movie are also unreasonable. For example, when Clair finds an unknown key in her home, how can she think of the same key sold in a town far away from her home? She has been to that town once only, and the logo marked on the keys is not extraordinary. When she gets the key, how can she realize that it is for a box deep under the lake nearby her home? When she gets the box from the bottom of the lake and finds a necklace inside, how can she knows that it is the necklace of the ghost? All these are mysterious. Maybe the movie has explained them, but it explains poorly. The movie is not convincing at all.

Not only unreasonable, the plots are also not exceptional. This movie brings no surprise to us. All the plots are familiar to us as they are adapted from many other movies, or I should say the plots are typical and common. That’s why we can foresee the story. At  the very beginning of the movie, when Dr. Spencer drives to a bridge and Claire warns him that there has no connection for mobile phones, we know that Clair will get trouble there later. When she goes inside the bathroom with water vapour and the camera is focused on the mirror, we expect the face of the ghost will be reflected on the mirror. When Spencer chases her and wants to kill her after she finds out the truth, Claire escapes with a truck. She loses his trace, and we know that Spencer is on the truck already. All the plots are foreseeable. If we have watched quite a lot American ghost movies, we will understand how this movie is only an assortment of plots like Scary Movie!

This movie is not outstanding, mostly because it lacks a theme. This movie aims at scaring us, and so it does not have depth on any issues. After watching this movie, all you can learn, maybe, is only yelling! There are quite a lot excellent ghost stories, for example, Ghost, which proves that ghost movies cannot only scare us, but also touches us. However, this movie goes a thrilling way only. It is meaningless and only for entertainment. We do not need to think, just relax and let the movie frighten us!  Compare to the Japanese ghost movies like Another Heaven and Hypnosis, which inspires us to think about human being’s weaknesses, What Lies Beneath is absolutely sub-standard.

All in all, What Lies Beneath is a typical ghost movie only. It is good for entertainment, but without any value for film study. What lies beneath this movie? What can we think of after watching it? What can we learn from it? I cannot get the solutions .