Touches You

Too much of everything

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Overall a good thriller with an unexpected ending. It´s one of those movies that you can really only watch once as once you know the ending it takes all the "magic" away. Would we watch it again, maybe in a few years when the memory is not so good.

This is a movie that's about a lot of things that are easy to figure out - and a lot that can't be explained. It's more "military" than many movies that are a little like it, but isn't like any of them.A Special Ops group is assigned to accomplish a mission. The mission seems fairly straightforward until you realize that it isn't following its own plot layout.Then it gets historic/strange/bizarre....A lot of inexplicable events occur, and the director manages to meld them into the story quite well. But the underlying strangeness...I can understand why some people couldn't get this movie. I did, though, I think. And I liked it. The ending is especially good, and was cribbed by District 9.

Considering TO was made by the same putz (Myrick) who gave us "The Blair Witch Project" (which then started an crapalavalanche of awful hand-held-camera horror turds), it's miraculous that this movie is this solid. Never dull, in spite of its fairly slow pace, it offers an extremely vague ending which can be only called that – an "ending" – because it ends the movie, and not because it's any kind of viable conclusion of the story.Vague endings are a two-edged sword. On one hand, a vague ending can be thought-provoking hence interesting, something to muse over after the movie's finished. But for this to be the case, it has to be a QUALITY vague ending, not just any old run-of-the-mill vague ending, hitting the fine line between total confusion and blatant obviousness. (If you're getting sick of the word "vague", so am I. I will not use it anymore.) On the other hand, if an ending is too v****, it might be too frustrating, as it might not even hint at what the hell just went on. It is abundantly clear – especially given this director's track-record of setting up mysteries but having no clue how to end them – that if you asked Myrick to explain to you what the conclusion is really about, he wouldn't have any clue whatsoever. Hence, in a sense TO is a like a cheap magic trick. It looks good but there is nothing "deep" or "layered" behind it. It's a scam.One reviewer, who must be an incurable optimist, offers the ridiculous theory that the movie is about Djinns. The word "djinn" wasn't mentioned once, nor were lamp-derivated apparitions even hinted at, at any point in the movie, so this guy basically pulled that theory straight out of his behind. Yet he totally forgot to even mention – let alone explain – Keynes's last line, the movie's key line, "they will save us all", and how that could possibly relate to (the evil) Djinns. The Djinns will save us all? Don't they first have to ask Aladdin for permission? Perhaps Aladdin is Bin Laden; I can certainly see the similarity: Al-Laden, Bin-Laden. Myrick would be laughing, if he ever heard that theory. Besides, just picture the CIA HQ giving these orders to Keynes: "We are sending you on a top-secret mission to Afghanistan, where you will find out as much about Djinns as you can. Remember Aladdin's little friend? That's who we're looking for. And make sure to find Aladdin too. He might help us fight the Taliban, who knows what secret weapons he possesses. It would be AMAZING if we could wipe out entire armies by a simple rub of a lamp." "They will save us all". It's a neat little mega-mysterious, intriguing line to give the main character before the end-credits roll, but it means absolutely nothing. If these Djinns/aliens/leprechauns/whatever were around as far back as at the time of Alexander the Great, then why haven't they "saved us" by now? God knows a few thousand years should be more than enough for an advanced race of Djinns/aliens/leprechauns/whatevers to save anyone. And the mere notion that an advanced race of beings, good or evil, would actually decide to lounge around in the ugly, deserted, depressing rocky plains of Afghanistan for thousands of years, makes me snicker. Absurd. Wouldn't they rather settle in Florida or on the sandy beaches of Australia? "They will save us all" is sort of like Myrick's attempt to match "My God, it's full of stars", the last line uttered in Kubrick's "2001". In fact, the last few minutes of TO definitely evoke memories of that movie, and I am convinced that Myrick imitated it, whether consciously or not.Another reviewer here complains that the soldiers weren't nearly as interesting as those in "Aliens". Yes, I agree: Cameron's soldiers were action-movie buffoons, clowning around and behaving like little children half the time - hence "interesting". Myrick tried not to let this become yet another overly goofy representation of the military, tried to keep it half-way realistic, which is a good thing. Cameron can keep his silly soldiers, his stupid blue morons, and his ship-sinking lesbian love-stories (coz Di Caprio looks like a girl, see).The one thing that did annoy me greatly was Jonas Ball (Keynes) and his damn incessant mumbling. Perhaps he figured, if it worked for Brando it will work for me too. (God knows WHY it worked for Brando. More likely, Brando made it in spite of his mumbling, not because of it.) Worse yet, Myrick not only gave this chronic mumbler the main role, but narration duties too. Suffice it to say that I didn't understand whole chunks that this guy was spewing through his barely open mouth, especially during the narration, which meant I had to look at the subtitles, like some ESL schluck, in order to follow parts of the movie. His enunciation makes him come off as a tired slacker, too lazy to speak, not like a seasoned soldier working for the CIA. That isn't the voice or speaking manner of a determined, disciplined, and focused man; that's the voice of a wimp sheepishly describing why his socks are too tight.

It's understandable this was in the science fiction section of Bluckbuster. It has unexplained phenomena that characters are subjective to, something often capable of unsettling people. Howevr, here its played for mystery value, as often there were scenes that didn't feel like the audience was supposed to get scared.The characters were, aside from the character of Abdul, not terribly indistinguishable. The protagonist was mainly separate from the others by being from the Government rather than the military, but besides being more aware of the phenomena he was quite bland. The chief officer was mainly distinguishable from the others only because he provided conflict with the protagonist.The others - one died quickly, one became sick, and, honestly, that's the closest to characterisation I remember them getting.Despite this, its quite interesting and, despite early resemblance to "Death Watch" and "Outpost", its a different film.