Finally had the chance to catch Paranormal Activity 2. I can't remember if I blogged about it or not, but the first one got mixed reviews from me too.
Let's talk about the good first. Sorry to say, there aint much.
Anyone who has experienced their own "paranormal activity" knows that there are no rules but that there are definitely trends. No two hauntings are exactly alike, and yet anyone who has been through the experience will somehow instantly connect with another person who has. Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2 demonstrate this well.
The first half of the movie was pretty standard-- happy, but sterile, family welcomes new baby into a very adult world, and things proceed to go haywire. Because of the style of PA and PA2 (think handheld cams and fixes home security cams) I admit the first half of the movie was somewhat treacherous for me.
I literally felt like I had paid someone ten bucks to watch my own life on the movie screen. Tedious segments of wailing babies in the middle of the night needing hugs, feeding babes, and babies being dressed, changed, or played with and cooed over seemed to go on and on as days turned to nights and nights turned to day with not much action. The little action there was (baby stares at "something," dog and baby stare at "something," items seem to move themselves, bla bla bla) was so commonplace at ANY baby-filled house, haunted or not, that I found it utterly mundane viewing... At least, for me. It was quite literally the story of my life.
Hoping for more, I went for a well-timed popcorn and potty break and returned with the mindset that it had to get better.
Fast forward to the set up-- wierd stuff is going on , we discover that the mother has had previous experience living in a haunted house, and the set methodology for coping with it is laid out. The parents choose to ignore it despite evidence taken from the household cameras, while the younger, obnoxious teenage daughter (surprise) decides to hold a seance using a makeshift ouija board with a boyfriend while she's supposed to be babysitting the child.
Naturally, things grow stranger still once the daughter has inadvertently given her express "Oui (yes) Ja (yes) permission, and suddenly people are being moved and entire kitchens messed with a-la "The Sixth Sense."
OK, pause. At this point, I had to ask myself what I wanted to get out of the experience. A fright? Some ideas? To relive something? The truth is, I just wanted to have fun, and to take some time to think about these types of events. The first Paranormal Activity did a good job of that for me since it was soooo drawn out and had so little plotline. It's very similar to the authentic experience, where you might have one event one year, then three the next, then 230 the next, then nothing the next year. The thing I didn't like, of course, was the cheesy end to what began looking like a real possession.
OK, so call me jaded. :-P
The end of this one was very similar, with events escalating to a culminating moment of possession and then overt cheeseball graphic violence committed by the "demon" possessing the character.
Additionally, I felt that this movie would have made very little sense to the viewer who had not seen the original, which is lame. There were tons of nods to the original and plot twists that linked the two.
An actual possession is gradual, taking place as people little by little open themselves up by small acts of their will. In time, they give themselves up completely to bondage.
Evil spirits operate more on the plane of intellect than on the plane of physics... as fallen angels, their every action is one of intellect. Thus, their primary course of action is more spiritual and psychological than overtly visible or physical. That doesn't mean they can't do physical things, it just means that they do manifest in that way for a reason-- not to possess a person but rather to instill fear, to create a sense of chaos in a home that might break up a marriage or make a mother hate her child. Their purpose in cases like this is almost never ownership or possession, which is why I was annoyed with the final twists of the plotline.
The demon in the film, as we presume there is only one, (in reality, demons are like cockroaches, they multiply if allowed) is hell-bent on demonstrating his physical abilities and prowess.
These movies portray demons as invisible monsters with very similar capabilities as humans- they lift, they move, they roar, they throw fits. We just can't see them. Never mind the fact that demons are far more subtle than that.
Ultimately, this movie further promotes the idea that demons are like uber-mean, invisible super-bad guys, not actually like fallen angels, which are subtle, and terrifying not because they can lift us up and open our kitchen cabinets but because they can get in our heads and under our skin, because they know when a well-timed pan dropping or a sudden sensation of being watched will affect us most. Not in order to convince us to kill and maim each other as they do in the film, but to convince us to lose our ETERNAL souls by causing us to hate and doubt ourselves or our relationships with God and each other.
Ah, Satan... so so smart to enable a movie that has so much potential to be accurate to portray you as comical and far less threatening than you actually are, all the while SEEMING terrifying to the untrained eye.
Maybe it's just me, but I found Paranormal Activity 2 MENTALLY dull, even though I had fun watching it. I look forward to the day when a paranormal movie addresses the grim reality of evil spirits rather than speaking the flawed, immature language of the typical armchair demonologist who gains all his knowledge by watching Ryan Buell hunt the magical, mystical "demons" on PRS with super cool ghost hunting equipment.
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