Thursday, August 11, 2016

THE ATTICUS INSTITUE

Directed by: Chris Sparling
Starring by: William Mapother, Rya Kihlstedt, John Rubinstein
Production: Safran Company

I’ve got this movie as a recommendation after I post about 9 extraordinary ability of Indigo. I don’t know whether this movie ever screen here but I could be wrong…I don’t remember…but there’s a book with nearly similar topic which I‘d read before with a title, Miss Peregrine and Home for Peculiar Children


Thanks to my friend Tirsa Tan who gave me the book and for your surprised my daughter loved the book as well after she finished it before I did.

When people are little tired with camera-point of view-kindathing style, we were offered with almost the same style but in different perspective. This movie shown the images of a reporter who’s been doing investigation stuff about what had happened inside the institute that runs the experiment on peoples who had special talent. So, we’re like seeing a documentary movie or sort of. There’s no sequential order of scene like a narrative story, but snippets of images of interviews.

The project leader, Dr. Henry West, was the founder of the institute that studying people who perform paranormal activity such E.S.P and psycho kinesis since 1970. The objective of the experiment was not clear but I think it had something about military mission to enhance the ability of internal entity. The crew interviewing several subjects who could guess the card perfectly in each round but the research was defected when one of the subjects that they’re proud of caught cheated, and it ruins all the theory they already develop in first place.  
  
The situation runs as it’s like on a research department until the woman named Judith Winstead came to the Institute. On her first day she already caught attention with a blood that came out from her hand. Dr. West asked whether she bite her hand by herself but day after day when they’re doing some research on her some magic things happened…thing that never seen before and it’s going crazy each time…

Some guys happy with it, they thought they’re finally had their own Nina Kulagina, some psychic from The Soviet Union (USSR) who have telekinesis ability to move objects with her mind, the feud between America and the Soviet Union is still strong in 1976 so that’s why they were so excited. But the rest were afraid because there’s no measure of her abilities and people often anxious about something they couldn’t control.

Many weird case becoming a prove to those scientists that her ability is beyond normal, that’s why they need help from the military that finally take charge. Robert Koepp from US Minister of Defense came and made everything even worse. Every day Judith was tortured to pull her power out and it had to pay by everyone who researched her.  

One of the coolest tests was when Judith ordered to control the heart beat of the frog and she did well until killed the frog by blown it heart out. Similarly she was ordered to control the rhythm of human heartbeat outside the Institute and she’d done that, they had to stop her by force when she almost killed the victim. It’s obviously Robert’s goal to maintain the research, which is to control Judith ability so the military could use her to kill everybody who’s against the government from afar.

Though her hand had tide but in reality Judith was in control. She terrorized everyone in the Institute personally till they realized that her power was not human but something demonic. Many prove said that the more experiments they conducted on Judith, the clearer it became that her abilities were the manifestation of evil forces within her. It’s creepy indeed if you're keeping the sick and the next thing you know that fellow getting out of bed and stood in terrible way, then by suddenly the entire room was falling apart by some invincible hand…and that’s what happened to the girl that watched Judith on her bed.

Finally Robert decided to invite the priest to do exorcism. And this is the point where the movie got funny when the priest request by leading agent to thumbprint the document while there’s no ink but the priest thumb had already black by ink. 

The main purpose is Robert wanted to transfer the demon inside Judith to his man from military but it move to Dr. West. The project leader killed Judith and all of crews, after the chaos Dr. West disappeared and Atticus Institute were shut down by the government and it remains unknown.    

Well, as I suspected the subject matter is interesting. The movie is very well pace, though the scene was back and forth as the documentary point of view, it had the fit pace. It’s not so fast nor slows to established viewer adaptation about heavy topic of telekinesis and research kind of stuff. We don’t want to get caught into fantastical universe because it’s a film with documentary approach so it had to stays with the realistic and remains authentic, mostly a realistic and authentic condition in 1976. So, despite the little mistake about the priest I think the movie is flawless…

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