Ebert Did It Better: Gasbag Reviews

The Apparition – 2012

Written and Directed by Todd Lincoln
Starring Ashley Greene, Sebastian Stan, Tom Felton, Juliana Guill, Luke Pasqualino, Suzanne Ford

There are lots of dumb aspects to The Apparition:

1. The acting: There are plenty of decent actors in the film.  Felton spent the better part of a decade being one of the nemeses of Harry Potter.  Greene is pretty much the best actress in the overwhelmingly popular Twilight series.  I know that does not sound like much.  Sebastian Stan is Bucky Barnes and we all know this means he becomes Winter Soldier.  The producers of this film thought that these guys had star power and that they could act.  Somewhere in this mess all hope of that was lost.
2. The script: We have an experiment gone bad.  If that isn’t bad enough, we have a bunch of others willing to “improve” on that project.  Then, when that goes wrong, they do it again with more power, and then towards the end, the thought is that even more power might take care of the problem.  It doesn’t.  They are fighting the wrong problem.
3. The music: The director must have loved John Carpenter’s simple approach.  The people he hired to work on this film don’t deserve repeating.  The music reminded me how bad the acting was.  Minimalist does not begin to describe it.
4. The director: He put all this crap together.  The movie made a little over half of what it cost to produce.  I would like to charge him for my time.

(*1/2 out of *****)