BY DANIEL BAIG | (** Contains two CLEARLY MARKED spoiler paragraphs.**)

The Mothman Prophecies is one of the most boring big budget movies ever made. It is probably the most boring "thriller" since Executive Action, the 1973 Kennedy assassination conspiracy flick which made Oliver Stone's later JFK look like Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

It's been rated PG-13 by the MPAA, which gives its reasons as being the movie's "TERROR, SOME SEXUALITY, LANGUAGE."

Well, it does indeed have some sexuality, very early on in the proceedings. And "language," sure.

But, "terror'? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Whooh! Hoo-boy, that's funny! I wonder if Screen Gems (the arm of Sony Pictures releasing The Mothman Prophecies) bribed the MPAA to say that. There is exactly one half-second moment of terror in this movie. It, too, comes very early into the film.

This half-second is most definitely NOT worth your nine dollars. Or your five-fifty. Or even two hours of your life. Now if you happen to be seeing another movie in an adjoining theater in a multiplex, and your show hasn't started yet, it might be worth it for you to sneak into the showing of Mothman to catch the first ten minutes or so. But that's the only way I could recommend it, unless you happen to be a cinematographer, or an aspiring cinematographer, or perhaps even a photography student.

If  and only if  you fall into one of those categories, then the first ten minutes or so of The Mothman Prophecies ARE actually worth your time and money.

Well, unless you're the kind of person who thinks that EVERY single episode of The X Files, even those ones, like especially in the first season or two, when absolutely nothing happened, is gripping and terrifying. In that case, just stop reading right now, because YOU actually WILL enjoy The Mothman Prophecies.

I really wanted to like this movie. Its director was Mark Pellington, both of whose previous films I thought were pretty darn good. Going All The Way, his first non-video or TV feature, was a sadly relatively unheralded debut. It's both a very funny and very poignant adaptation by writer Dan Wakefield of his own coming-of-age-in-Indiana-in-the-1950's novel, and it's well worth renting if you haven't seen it. It also happens to feature Ben Affleck's finest performance (at least that I've seen). And already one can see in it that Pellington really has a terrific feel for light and shadow, at least in color film (where this kind of thing isn't usually thought about nearly as much as in black and white). Or perhaps it was just that he was blessed to work with a cinematographer, Bobby Bukowski, who had this feel.

Pellington's second movie, a much bigger budget affair, was 1999's Arlington Road, which also didn't get the audience it deserved. It, too, was shot by Bukowski, and in it he and Pellington outdid themselves with their stunning use of darkness and light. It's a widescreen film, a fact which the director and his cinematographer take bold advantage of; one scene is framed so that practically the entire screen is taken up by the almost pitch black deep shadows of a room, except at the far left end, where Jeff Bridges, the protagonist, sits in a little patch of light, foreshadowing the isolation he will soon be experiencing in the movie.

The first ten minutes or so of The Mothman Prophecies contain some similarly skillful chiaroscuro shots, leading me to think Bukowski was once more the director of photography. However, this kind of artistry seemed to have been pretty much abandoned when the story got underway, and it turns out the cinematographer was actually Fred Murphy. For the most part, Mothman is a movie of gray light (or nighttime black). The majority of the daytime scenes seem to have been shot under overcast skies  just the kind of thing you want to go see in January, huh?

Mothman also proves, once again, that there's one thing more important than a director on a movie: a good script. Pellington may be talented, but not talented enough to turn nothing into something, and this screenplay, and consequently the movie, is just a whole lot of nothing.

I don't want to be accused of giving away the movie's "secrets," so I won't go into too much detail about its story. I will say that it turns out not to be about alien abduction, though for a good long portion of it that's what it (knowingly) makes you think it will be. Indeed, it really hews closely to that path  an acclaimed writer has some mysterious things happen to him, involving lost hours while driving on a country road. Later he meets others (and others, and others), at first are scared to share their stories, who turn out to have had similar odd and distressing experiences. Gradually the pieces of the puzzle start to come together, helped especially by finally tracking down a reclusive "expert" in the field who in the past wrote books about the subject, but now shuns the public eye because of the professional ridicule he was exposed to which ruined his life, caused his wife to leave him, etc. And then the mysterious beings, perhaps jealous of others stealing their thunder, go ahead and make the most direct contact yet with our protagonist, but in ways that are still frustratingly incomprehensible, involving "What's the frequency, Kenneth?"-type messages delivered in funny voices over the phone, like super-duper-advanced teenage life forms making prank calls beyond our mortal ken.

(Amusingly, when the being makes contact over the phone in Mothman Prophecies, he gives his name as Ingrid [sic] Cold, even though he sounds like a guy. Now, that's no Keyser Soze, but it's admittedly still a catchy bizarro name.)

Does this sound vaguely familiar? It especially might if you've seen the goofy Communion, starring Christopher Walken as Whitley Streiber, the horror/science-fiction novelist (imagine the odds of someone with THAT exact job description being contacted by aliens; perhaps they were fans of The Hunger) who claimed in his, ahem, non-fiction book of the same name to have been chosen by Third Kinds to, well, commune with. The major differences:

Well, Walken is bizarre, even pre-contact, while Richard Gere, Mothman's star (playing, yes, an acclaimed writer), is mostly extraordinarily empathetic. With his big brown eyes, slight trace of a sympathetic, non-condescending smile, and apparently boundless reserves of patience, he's like the world's greatest listener, at least when it comes to listening to rural folk ramble on about big lights in the sky;

and, Mothman probably was made for about five times Communion's budget. So, rest assured, no funny obviously plastic puppet aliens like those Walken was forced to act opposite.

Except . . . actually . . . no well-done aliens either.

Or creatures of any kind.

Nope. Though The Mothman Prophecies IS about the Mothman (again, not actually an alien), not-so-funnily enough, aside from a half-second glimpse (the half-second of terror I mentioned above), we only see him in crayoned drawings. Really.

I suppose the filmmakers could say, "Well, nothing we could come up with would be as powerful as what your imagination can conceive." To which I say, "You know what? If I wanted to use my imagination, I'd stay home and listen to a radio play [yeah, they still exist; try your public radio station]. For nine bucks, in a movie called The Mothman Prophecies, I want to see a damn special effect Mothman!!"

However, it's clear that just about the entire special effects budget was saved up for the very end of the movie, where there is finally one (very relatively speaking) blowout sequence. It's not very impressive, however. No mothmen here, either. Just a lot of poorly choreographed, and very poorly edited, shots that make it hard to tell what's going on. With some pretty obvious miniature work. It is absolutely NOT NOT NOT worth the wait.

It's also in poor taste. Because, and you should skip this and the following paragraph if you're really planning on seeing the movie and don't want any indication of where it's going, this grand finale can be taken to mean that all of the quite elaborate stuff the Richard Gere character, and his family, goes through, is only done to save ONE life out of many, and seemingly at the expense of another.

-- SPOILER --

You see, BIG SPOILER, we're told eventually that the Mothman appears  has appeared, throughout history, all over the world (so how come I and nobody else I know every heard of it before? I mean, I've heard of the yheti, Bigfoot, Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, the chupacabra, the mokele-mbembe, the kind-hearted Republican  all those legendary, elusive, only-been-seen-by-a-few-believers creatures.) in an area before a giant disaster is going to strike; it seems to warn people, but usually too cryptically for them to do anything about it. It doesn't seem to cause the tragedies; it just hovers around spooking people until it happens. So why in the world does it kill Gere's character's wife? Just so he can eventually save Laura Linney's character? Bizarre, unpleasant  and not even in character with what's said about the Mothman (as I've learned from reading about him online).

-- END SPOILER --

Okay, safe to read again.

The Mothman Prophecies actually starts out quite promisingly. In addition to the impressive lighting and camera work, the beginning of the movie plays like the introduction to a classy "couple-in-love-moves-into-house-which-turns-out-to-be-haunted" story (like What Lies Beneath promised to be  though it lied). Gere and Debra Messing (Will of Will and Grace! Just kidding, she's Grace.) are in LOVE LOVE LOVE; you know this because they start to have sex on the floor of a closet in a house WHILE A REALTOR IS SHOWING IT TO THEM! (He's at first in another room at the time, but then opens the closet door, which is a slatboard, Venetian-blinds type  i.e. not thick-walled , on them, catching them in flagrante delicto; you'd think he would have heard them. But maybe he just wanted to close the sale really badly; if so, it worked, for they buy the house right there and then.)

This part of the movie strongly reminded me of quite similar opening sequences in the classic chiller Rosemary's Baby. Sadly, that comparison was soon abandoned.

The way these scenes are shot, along with the music on the soundtrack, definitely make it seem like we're in store for a haunted house story. But, no. There does, however, soon follow a traffic accident, which features the movie's one scare.

And then it still for a long time seems like it's going to be a haunted house, or at least a haunted street (or haunted sidewalk), story. We have far too many (actually, one is more than needed, but we get at least three) ominous scenes of Gere staring at the tree next to the spot where the accident happened (is the tree haunted?? Uh, no.), or even the garbage can that was hit (is it a haunted garbage can?? Haunted by the unhappy ghost of a garbage man?)

Speaking of designed-to-be-spooky shots of Gere staring at trees while the soundtrack tries to scare us, there are about fifteen more to come before the movie's over. You know that idea about if you show a gun in the first act of a play you better use it by the third act? Well, I kept thinking SURELY one of these tree shots is going to pay out; the Mothman's gotta jump out at him from the branches eventually. After all, other people have told him they saw the Mothman in or in front of trees in their yards.

But no. Like everything else about this movie, it's a tease which never turns into anything. As a matter of fact, The Mothman Prophecies is one giant long tease.

Another example -- we also get a lot of shots where the camera slowly sneaks up on Gere when his back is turned to it (us). The camera eventually gets all the way in, and he senses something, and turns around . . . Is there ever anything there, like, say, a MOTHMAN? No!! Never!

Basically the vast majority of the movie is taken up by Richard Gere interviewing people. Visually, of course, that's like death for a movie. Richard Linklater had the same problem last year with his philosophical-ramblings-disguised-as-art film Waking Life. He, of course, got around the problem by painting over all the conversations, making it look like an animated feature. Pellington, obviously, didn't have that option, so he does what most American filmmakers do when confronted by scenes of long conversation  he has the actors walk around while they're talking, and has the camera move a lot as it follows them, to create the illusion that something is actually happening. (I said American deliberately; French directors, see Erich Rohmer, are content just to let their characters sit at a table and talk to each other.)

Go check out The Mothman Prophecies trailer online right now. Knowing what I've told you, you'll easily see that I'm not lying. The trailer desperately tries to make it look like this is going to be a thriller, but you'll notice it's mostly just people talking about the horrible things they saw. To disguise this, the trailer was edited with super-quick cuts, like action film trailers are, but actually what's being cut between, you'll note, are just shots of Gere and Linney turning their heads around and stuff. The trailer does contain that one half-second money shot I told you about, though out of context, robbing it of its impact.

Why? Why is the movie's screenplay so lame? Because it turns out the movie is based on a "non-fiction" book by John Keel (who Gere is basically playing) which recounts his investigation into the Mothman. So screenwriter Richard Hatem presumably couldn't deviate too far from what Keel wrote. (The one major change is that the events in the book transpired in 1966 and 1967; the movie is set in present day.)

So the movie plays just like one of those weird UFO books you might stumble across in the library, and intrigued by its cover, start to flip through. At first the author may seem lucid, intelligent, and even convincing, mentioning lots of "historical" records of sightings, etc., and using a lot of eye-witness testimonies from seemingly normal people. But then, inevitably, the book starts to read like one of those crazy guys on the bus or the subway muttering things to you; it starts to fill up with, "Oh, wait, here's more proof," i.e. more bizarre testimonials, etc. But these "facts" start getting farther and farther-fetched, often venturing wide afield of the nominal topic of the book. In the end, this kind of volume is never a satisfying read.

Indeed, Hatem left out a lot, to make the movie more possibly acceptable to people. If you go to the movie's website, you'll see that not only did people in the real town in '67 report Mothmen sightings, but also UFOs, and, wouldn't you know it, those pesky Men In Black (not Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones) threatening them to keep quiet about the Mothman. And that's like a whole different set of crackpot beliefs, I mean, pardon me, mythology. That's government conspiracy and flying saucer stuff. If the town wasn't West Virginia and was, say, in more Latino parts of the country, I'm sure there would have been sightings of the Virgin Mary as well.

Now, actually, that sounds like I'm just a skeptic who'd be hostile to this kind of material no matter what. But that's not true. I'm just hostile to bad movies.

Grade: D