gaaaaah.
Godsend is a shitty, shitty movie. Mostly, though, not for what it was, but what the directors
wanted it to be. Abandon hope of avoiding spoilers, all ye who enter here.
The story starts out with Dad, Mom, and Kid, all happily living in the city. Kid dies in car crash, Mom and Dad moderately upset. Doctor shows up and tells them he can clone the kid, but since it's illegal and all, they'd have to move to the country where his lab is, etc etc. They do so, and Kid grows up. As soon as Kid hits his age-of-previous-death (eight), he starts acting weird, ie, killing people and having weird visions/dreams. It turns out that Doctor also had a son who died (named Zachary), a son who killed his mother and burned down a school after trapping some hated classmates inside. But Doctor couldn't ressurect his own son (DNA messed up from fire), so put part of his son's DNA into Kid's DNA when he cloned Kid. Here's where the ending starts: Dad finds out all that Doctor did, confronts him in a church. They have a brief fight, Dad gets hit on the back of the head with something, and we pan out as Doctor is leaving and the church is burning. Mom is off finding Kid, who's wandered off into the shack in the woods with a meat-axe in it which we know will be used to kill Mom. but just as he's about to kill Mom (with an axe to the face, no less), Dad shows up and saves her. fade out, fade in, they've moved to a new town, and the new doctors Kid has been with have been helping him get better. a few quick scary scenes implying he's not all better yet, we see Doctor off in some mansion reading newspapers about "missing physician escapes law" and "family loses child in terrible accident yesterday", and movie ends.
The two crappy parts of this movie are 1) cloning is evil and leads to homicide, and 2) parents (especially Dad) were evil for wanting to have their son back and for trying to use science to do it, and then for blaming doctor for doing his "i'm gonna clone your kid but actually put my kid in him too" thing. That could be dealt with while avoiding too much vomiting. but THEN we saw one of the 5 alternate endings. we couldn't turn the director's commentary off (no matter how many times we clicked "off"), so we got to hear him say how much he loved the following ending: Dad gets clubbed in church. we zoom to Mom in scary axe-shack, and just before she gets it to the face from her son,
Doctor shows up and saves her. he then calls Kid "zachary" (the name of his dead son), and Kid loves him for it. fade out, fade in, Doctor is a respected person in teh community, Mom really likes him, Kid is all better, Dad died in the church fire/clubbing, and Mom sheds a tear or two for him. THIS was the ending the director wanted, and that all the cool peole he was with wanted. the reason it didn't happne, he said, is that none of the audiences liked it.
what have we learned? fucking director-intellectuals can suck cock for being so stupid as to 1) have no clue how cloning works, 2) thinking science is evil, and 3) NOT KNOWING WHO YOUR OWN DAMN VILLIAN IS. the dad was
not the villian; he was trying to save his son from crazy doctor bastard who fucked up the cloning agreement, so what in god's name would possess you to think
he deserved to be clubbed? the doctor should have been axed in the face, for pete's sake. instead, he is rich and loved by all; at least, that's what the director wanted. he settled for Doctor escaping all judgement, remaining rich, and plotting to do all this again. thank god people have enough of a moral compass to know the difference between mere crappiness and complete moral bankruptcy.
