The Mothman Prophecies (2002)

This is, for better or worse (mostly worse), very much a product of its time, landing around the end of the X-Files, which this borrows from heavily. Elements also feel similar to Donnie Darko, though I'm skeptical this would have had the time or inclination to replicate anything about that film, which had bombed at the box office. Of course, all of this stuff is drawing inspiration from the work of David Lynch - some editing and effects choices in The Mothman Prophecies seem to be directly referencing Twin Peaks.

Oh, and it's also based on a book I haven't read. The book purports to be non-fiction, with the caveat this stuff tends to strain the definition of that categorization. This is, after all, a story about extra-dimensional aliens prophesizing future catastrophes that cannot be prevented. Whether or not you believe that's possible, I assume anyone reading this is intelligent enough to have figured out by now the media built up around it is almost universally created by con artists.

The movie doesn't claim to be a true story (it changes the protagonist's name from the author of the book, John Keel, to John Klein), but it maintains it's inspired by true events. Mostly one true event, which is the collapse of The Silver Bridge, which occurred because of an eyebar failure on December 15, 1967.

Keep that in mind when the end credits try to convince you the cause was never determined.

I find the decision to outright lie about the tragedy distasteful, but that's not what's wrong with the movie. The Mothman Prophecies is by design a mess of a film intended to confuse the audience, replicating the sensation of losing one's mind when confronted by forces that refuse to be defined by logic - again, this really wants to be Twin Peaks. But Twin Peaks was made by David Lynch, who had the ability to convey those ideas and emotions poetically. With all due respect to director Mark Pellington, The Mothman Prophecies mostly feel like it's going through the motions. This either needed a well of inspiration or a near-infinite budget to overwhelm us with spectacle - it had neither.

It does have Richard Gere as Klein, an investigator for The Washington Post whose wife dies after a car crash possibly caused by her seeing the Mothman (sadly, the movie omits connections to the third-rate Batman villain, Killer Moth). The crash actually isn't the problem - it turns out she has a rare, uncurable brain tumor they only discover because of her hospitalization.

This all occurs around Christmas, incidentally, though by the seventeenth minute the movie has jumped forward about two years, introducing the one real point of suspense in the film: will The Mothman Prophecies technically qualify as a Christmas movie?

It's winter on the other side of the time jump, complete with a dusting of snow across the various locations this is occurring in. It'll be a while before we get any hint as to when in winter, but around fifty minutes later there's a Christmas tree lighting ceremony, so... it's a Christmas movie after all!

I'll just take the movie at its word that DC had an abnormally snowy late November/early December in 1967.

At any rate, Klein starts driving from DC towards Virginia for an interview, when he's somehow teleported to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where his car breaks down. From here, things get progressively weirder: he's held at gunpoint by a man named Gordon who claims Klein came to his house the two prior nights at the same time. Connie, the town's sheriff, deescalates the situation and eventually signs on as Klein's part-time Scully.

Klein investigates further and eventually befriends Gordon, who then starts being visited by the Mothman. At one point, Klein speaks with Mothman over the phone, and Mothman terrifies him with generic mentalism tricks. Okay, to be fair, he's doing mentalism in conditions that don't permit the usual methods allowing them to work, but still... these are standard mentalism effects.

There's a lot of running around, Klein interacts with an expert who provides exposition (the Mothmen have always been here, we don't know what they want or what they are, their predictions can't be prevented, etc.), Gordon dies, and Klein winds up with a prediction concerning an upcoming disaster along the Ohio River. He misinterprets this as a threat against a chemical plant, which damages his credibility when it doesn't come true. He's also told by the Mothman that his wife will call him on Christmas Eve at noon.

He flies back to DC, and gets a call just before noon from Connie, who asks him to fly back to West Virginia. Whatever calls him, she says, won't be his wife. He hangs up, and his phone rings again at noon exactly. He remembers that before she died his wife told him she wanted him to be happy, which he realizes won't be possible if he spends his life obsessing over this. So he heads back and winds up beside the Silver Bridge at 6:00 PM. Connie, meanwhile, is in her police truck on the bridge, which is clogged with traffic due to a light malfunction.

Klein runs to the bridge as it starts faltering and screams for people to get out of their cars. He convinces a bunch of people to get out, but Connie winds up going into the water in her truck. Klein jumps in and manages to save her, reconciling his trauma about being unable to save his wife after her accident. Also, this all ties back to a dream Connie had, proving once again that Mothman is real.

The movie's central theme centers on the acceptance of things we're unable to change: tragedies, the loss of loved ones, and so on. It's a movie that tells us not to dwell on the past (or, in the event of Mothman-induced visions, the future), as all we'll do is destroy ourselves. Does it undermine this message by concocting a scenario where Richard Gere can hero up to seemingly save somewhat from a preordained fate? Kind of! But by this point the movie was pretty much unsalvageable, so I don't begrudge them for throwing in a halfway decent bridge collapse action sequence. 

Let's talk holidays. During the first ten or fifteen minutes, they're used largely as an excuse to hide iconography in lights. For example, there are a couple Christmas trees in the hospital which form an 'M' shape similar to a pair of wings. The movie also takes every chance it can get to mimic the Mothman's glowing red eyes with whatever lights are handy.

Thematically, the movie also seems to be toying with the concepts of death and rebirth, which are of course linked to the moth. The Christmas at the beginning is one of death, while the one at the end... well, there's still a lot of death, but it's also the point where Klein chooses to live and experiences a sort of spiritual or psychological rebirth.

It's worth acknowledging the actual bridge collapse occurred near Christmas (December 15th) but is moved nine days in the film to land on Christmas Eve itself. I'm not sure how much of this was for symbolic and thematic reasons and how much was to just to up the tension around all this stuff happening on the holiday itself. Either way, it was clearly something they wanted to highlight.

And... it ultimately doesn't matter. To the limited extent this movie has picked up a following, it's for reasons having nothing to do with the holidays. To be clear, there are interesting things about this movie: it is, after all, exceedingly weird. But I kept feeling like the Lynchian elements were out of place in the largely humorless film. It just didn't work for me, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't as irrationally obsessed with Mothman as I am with Christmas.