Just when elements of the story are starting to get good, the movie will release all the tension that's been built way too soon. The first time I noticed this was with the old man getting slashed up. Ok, so the creatures already are getting into Sally's mind, she's drawing pictures of the ash box, she clearly wants to at least talk to them more. When she does finally sneak down there, and gets the grate open, she is interrupted. So far so good... but then as the old man puts the gate back on he gets attacked and cut up. So, we've just seen the worst these creatures can do... they can swarm you and not even fully take down a clearly feeble old man. They actually seem pretty easy for a fit person to fight off. All of a sudden, they're not as threatening and this happens pretty early in the movie. This pre mature wad shotage happens in a few other scenes too, like every time the creatures attack. I felt like the creatures would have been much more effective if they just waited for the perfect chance to strike once and take the girl. They attacked her in the bathroom with a house full of servants and construction workers, she gets attacked during a huge party in the mansion, she gets attacked when her parents are like down the hall in shouting distance. They just attacked way too much for there to be any tension left with the final battle at the end.

Practical effects over CGI would have worked way better. The creatures just don't look threatening. I know practical effects have limitations but that's the point. Those limitations make the creation look even more real.

The girl needed to get hurt. Maybe have her get cut or one of her teeth pulled out. Something to show that anything can happen to this little girl and we should dread every second those creatures were in the room with her. I guess that's the point of the old man getting cut up, but after like the third scene with her and the creatures alone together, you realized she wasn't in any real danger. Even when they were attacking her in the bathroom with fucking knives, still nothing. But, not only did she need to get physically hurt, she needed to be emotionally hurt more. I felt like the creatures needed to torture her psychologically more, just to soften her up so when they finally do make their move, she wouldn't even have the strength to fight them off. Or maybe even so she isolates herself from her father and his girlfriend to make her easy pickens. Make the little girl think she's crazy or something and get her when she is most vulnerable.

If the creatures are smart enough to know that turning on a car in an enclosed space will asphyxiate a grown man and they know what cameras and photographs are and they know what wires to cut to turn off power to the house, why aren't they smart enough to gather up every flashlight in the house and destroy them?

First off: they're tooth fairies. They practically say it out right (and in the companion book I understand they flat out say tooth fairies). So any kind of physical threat they could impose would always have to be a large group effort. the thing with the older groundskeeper I have to disagree with you. I thought he was a tough old bastard. The guy gets stabbed repeatedly, fights them off and makes it back upstairs on his own and actually lives. At that point in the movie I was like "ok cool, he's got to be integral to stopping them because he knows the most about them, survived an attack and cares about the little girl". In retrospect, this turned out to be the hight of my investment in the safety of and of the characters because nothing in the rest of the film came that close.

I found most of the script was fluff that could have been cut or reshot/rewritten because it either never leads to anything or never gets a resolution it deserved. Case in point: The fact that she lived with her mom who heavily medicated her and its implied that she's a socialite who probably was never fit for motherhood. And when you pair that up with the fact that Guy Piece is a shitty father (and a terrible stereotypical workaholic archetype) that the bond between Kim and Sally is supposed to be what drives the story. But it doesn't really click until the end of the flick (which I'll get to later). Had they cut that whole bit and just started with the three of them in the house and make it so the mom is out of the picture, then they could have worked on that bond between Sally and Kim more.

I hated Guy Pierce in this. Why cast someone who has amazing range as such a stock character? It was driving me mad throughout the whole movie. At one point I was hoping that the fairies would just take the kid and maybe he'd man up and finally show some emotion and actually go down and fight for her. But no. And what drove me nuts is he is a good actor. I got excited when I saw his name attached to this because the guy doesn't get enough work as I think he should.

This movie used up too many tired horror/suspense tropes that ended up really hurting it for me. I already went into my problem about how stock Guy Pierce was but here's the rest: there's a groundskeeper who's family has been in charge of the estate for nearly a hundred years that knows more than he lets on. There's a child psychologist who shows up to analyze the odd little girl who draws the things she see, and dismisses what she tells him as her just acting out. Adults who don't pay attention to their children. A bathtub scene; complete with bubbles. Mischievous little creatures who frame the main character for destroying things. And the worst offender: the random character introduced 2/3s of the way into the story who happens to know everything about everything. When that library scene happened I groaned. It was like he was waiting for one day for someone to walk in and ask about Blackwood because apparently, while an obscure artist, this young 20something librarian dedicated his life to studying everything about his art and house. Throw in "creepy old house", a dinner scene to impress investors/boss, and a hedge maze and about the the only thing missing was a strike of lightning and bats.

Then finally the ending. First I want to point out that I don't think they're smart enough to know that locking him in the garage with the car on would kill him. They don't lock him out of the car so really he could have turned it off if he wanted. I think they were up to their mischievous antics and also keeping him away from the other two. My beef is that the wrong adult was taken. Sally is not better off in the end with her dad. He's a douche who doesn't know thing one on how to raise a kid. And while its more impactful to take away the only person who ever tried to care about Sally; no effort was made to save her or avenge her. They don't fill up the hole, burn the house down, drop flares and climb down to try and rescue her. Nothing. In fact they do the worst thing possible and leave the house pretty much as is for it to happen to whoever buys the house.

Now with all that said, it sounds like I hated this movie, but I did find it entertaining a bit. I like the use of a creature from folklore who's image has been drastically skewed over the years. I liked the fact that Guy Pierce never sees them. Granted, by the end he knows Sally isn't crazy and making it up, but he never actually sees them. I liked how (at least up until the ending) the fairies didn't so much talk but mimic words, along with that "hatatatata" sound (sorry its just hard to convey that in text any other way). Up until that last bit of dialogue I had it in my head that they don't really know what they're saying but use they words and names they hear to mess with the family (kind of how the Predator "talks"), and that of the few words they do understand, "TEETH!" being the main one. You can see a lot of the Guillermo Del Torro stuff poking though (my friend said the movie was like a poor man's Pan's Labrynth, and I totally saw that too) even though its a remake of a 1973 movie with the same name. But its far from perfect.

I still think that the creatures attacking, (I refuse to call them tooth faeries because that is fucking stupid, sorry Del Toro) what felt like, every ten minutes or so really killed the movie. Here's how the time spent focusing on the attacks would have been spent better.... showing depth to the characters! I didn't care about one person in this movie at all. I couldn't relate to anyone of them, I didn't understand why they were doing what they were doing. Who are these people? A horror movie is so much more effective when you actually care about the people.

Here's how the movie could have been better... show how the creatures are good at manipulating children and breaking families apart to get at the children easier. Have them constantly torture Sally to the point that even she doesn't know if the voices are real or just in her head. Point is, don't show the creatures until the end when you have sufficiently built them up... and even so, still don't show them in naked light. Keep them shadowed and mysterious... maybe a little hand here and a tooth there, but keep them silhouetted. They clearly know how to sneak around undetected, they've survived for millions of years. During the final siege, the adults needed to be incapacitated more. Remember how they break Kim's legs? There should have been a scene early in the siege upstairs where Kim is fighting a group of the creatures and they back her up to a vent and throw a rope around her legs and attach the rope to something heavy or a machine elsewhere in the house (something that has a lot of torque) and snap her legs like twigs, just like they do later in the real movie. This would have put all the emphasis on the dad to come and rescue his daughter because Kim got fucked up. Then, maybe have the dad get incapacitated somehow. A poke in the eye, maybe even something as far as severing his spine (showing that the creatures really know how to fuck up a person because they've been doing it for so long). Actually, the dad being blinded would have been pretty cool. He'd never really have an idea of what had happened, his career would be taken from him, and it'd be up to Sally to take care of her father... kind of a nice little role reversal. Anyway, now the dad and Kim are fucked and it looks like Sally is done for... then Kim can show up, still badly injured and messed up and use all her strength she has left keeping the creatures away from Sally in an epic battle, going into battle knowing she is sacrificing her life for Sally... rather than her sacrifice be accidental like it was in the real movie.

Basically, the movie was missing "oh fuck!" moments. It needed more of those. And you see the creatures way to much for them to be scary.

There's really only two possibilities, A) the one the movie directly discusses: using the source code program creates a microverse of all the people involved every time it's used. Which is possible ... but this is an idea that actually violates the movie's gimmick-trust.

In the flick ... and most sci fi ... there's only about ... one MAYBE two gimmicks you can allow before you're a bad movie. In Source Code the gimmick is ... hey, we connected neural tissue together and it recreates the memories of the last 8 minutes of these people's lives and you can tap into that memory as a virtual-mental recreation of the event.

If the explanation is the one above, multiple universes ... it leaves A LOT of questions open ... like ... how can he find a bomb or know what it looks like or how it worked if the bomber wasn't on the train when it blew up. I mean, in the context of the movie, they caught the guy driving the white van that Corp.SeanJake discovered while going into the memory. This doesn't make sense, no one knew about those things except the bomber ... for those details to be there ... the bomber has to be dead and connected to the source code also.

But that brings up a question ... when'd he die.

So, possibility #2 ... the bombing of Chicago was always successful, everyone in the greater Chicago area has died, including the people running the original Source Code program.

There's just ... far too many things pointing to this as an explanation. There's the way the lead scientist is treated on the phone with the higher ups being virtually identical to how they treated Corp.SeanJake in the beginning of the movie. Them having the information about the bombs (it's perfectly possible that they just corralled everyone to figure out who did it and how). The fact that everything starts over in the end and he somehow successfully sent an email to a (supposedly) new universe iteration. It explains how he's still interacting with Christine after the 8 minutes have passed. It explains how they'd have any of the vast details not confined to the train. It also explains why time relation between the source code program and the lab were 1:1 ... when things happen in thought, like a dream, time is only a perceived attribute of what you experience. Things happen rapidly. So, 8 minutes of source code time would be more like 10-30 seconds real-world time. However ... it would make sense if they were all in the source code together ... they'd all be running (thinking) at the same speed. As for little logic details like ... if the people who created source code were in it ... wouldn't they remember that there'd be a time condensation effect? Yes, but the movie even points out that things can change every time you go in ... because people can remember things differently.

It just makes more sense that the source code project that is featured in the film is a second layer within an already running source code simulation.