Amenábar is the copy-paste master

Rating: 2/10 (10 September 2001)

We can begin with the best thing in The Others: Kidman, no doubt.
And the film itself is not a bad movie, but something worse. You can wonder what's worse than a bad movie? The answer is a non-original movie. And talking about Alejandro Amenábar a non-original movie is something really serious, because this boy has no one single original idea in his brains.
I mean, everything in his movies is copied from another film. In this case, even the idea and the lights are copied from another movies and not only the images, so this is something incredible. People who doesn't know much about cinema (or that are too young to have seen much movies) can see an obvious linking between The Others and The Sixth Sense (Night M. Shyamalan, 1999), but that is just one of the multiple copies of this film. And I write copies and not references or tributes, because I truly believe that Amenábar is a master in the copy-paste style. When you pay attention to The Others you can see images from The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), Room at the top (Jack Clayton, 1959), The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963), The Changeling (Peter Medak, 1980), La Chute de la Maison Usher (Jean Epstein, 1928), The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975, here the use of lights), and many others, including also Luis Buñuel (Viridiana, 1961) or Federico Fellini (Amarcord, 1974). So, there is an absolute lack of new ideas in this movie, what is an incredible pity, but a cruel reality. So, why much people love Amenábar? Well, it's really easy. When you are young you have no idea about what is already filmed. So you can create something incredible out of modern style just going to your videoclub and copying every single scene you love. But there is also another question more difficult to answer? Why do experts love this movie? OK, there are different possible answers. First, they are also too young and they have to learn much more. Second, they are Amenábar's friends (in Spain there are a lot of them, but even here there are some critics that have seen much copies in this movie than in any other filmed by the director). Third, they are in love with Nicole Kidman (and that's really normal). Fourth, they haven't seen the movie (this is not so impossible. I am a journalist and I know people who do it). Fifth, a mystery I don't understand. Summing up, Alejandro Amenábar is not a genius neither a clever director. He is just a lucky boy who knows the best way to make a movie without wasting a single minute of thinking: to copy. And in that he is really a master, or at least, one of the best plagiarists of the world. Congratulations for that.