The Unborn (2009)

Don't be fooled by this promotional poster, people! The Unborn, starring Odette Yustman as Casey Beldon, is kind of boring and unappealing. The movie does contain a few interesting scenes, though, and most of them revolve around ophthalmology.

Surely you remember learning about Josef Mengele, aka The Angel of Death, in high school. This Nazi physician at Auschwitz was apparently obsessed with twins, and used them in terrible experiments in concentration camps. The experiments included intraocular injections of various chemicals in an attempt to change eye color.

This real-life historical horror movie provides the back-story for The Unborn, and one of these injections is shown in a flashback sequence. As you might imagine, chemical injections in the eye can cause some major complications, and corneal clouding is seen in the victim in later scenes.

However, the most interesting eye-related content involves Casey Beldon's changing eye color and her subsequent evaluation by an ophthalmologist, Dr. Lester Caldwell. We covered iris heterochromia in an earlier Ophthalmology in Film entry, but to review:

Iris heterochromia may occur as a congentital condition (usually inherited as an autosomal dominant trait), or it may be acquired as a result of retained intraocular foreign body, topical medications, iris neoplasm, ICE syndrome, Fuchs' heterochromic iridocyclitis, Horner's syndrome, chronic iritis, juvenile xanthogranuloma, leukemia, or lymphoma.

I'll try to avoid a spoiler by letting you pick among the differential diagnosis list for our protagonist! Ophthalmology scenes in this movie include the aforementioned intraocular injection, an exam and consultation by the ophthalmologist, insertion of an eyelid speculum, and slit lamp photography.

The fact that I fell asleep twice during the climactic exorcism scene is telling. This meandering movie has some interesting historical tidbits and some strong eye-related content, but otherwise is a mishmash of disturbing images and horror cliches. I give The Unborn a C - . But don't just take my word for it, here is a quote from Wikipedia to wrap up this entry:

The Unborn received an overwhelmingly negative reaction from critics. Based on 96 reviews collected from notable publications, the film garnered a "Rotten" rating of 13% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009)

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs represents a modern 3-D homage to Herman Melville's Moby Dick, or a maybe it's just outright plot theft. A one-eyed weasel named Buck obsessively guides the old Ice Age gang through the jungle to find Rudy, an enormous white theropod dinosaur. A flashback scene shows the prior conflict between Buck and Rudy, where the dinosaur's talon strikes Buck's right eye. Fortunately for kids, the violence is only suggested here, rather than graphically depicted. Buck manages to patch his eye with a leaf, and narrowly escapes with his life.

Like Captain Ahab's whale-bone peg-leg, Buck's signature eye patch symbolizes his unending quest to vanquish his foe. Check out Ahab's rage here in Moby Dick:

The white whale tasks me; he heaps me. Yet he is but a mask. 'Tis the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate; the malignant thing that has plagued mankind since time began; the thing that maws and mutilates our race, not killing us outright but letting us live on, with half a heart and half a lung.

While we're quoting material obliquely related to Ice Age 3, how about a quote from the United States Eye Injury Registry?

Data from the National Center for Health Statistics' Health Interview Survey, conducted in 1977, estimated that nearly 2.4 million eye injuries occur in the United States annually. This report calculated that nearly one million Americans have permanent significant visual impairment due to injury, with more than 75% of these individuals being monocularly blind. Eye injury is a leading cause of monocular blindness in the United States, and is second only to cataract as the most common cause of visual impairment. USEIR estimates that 500,000 years of lost eyesight occur annually in the United States. Injury is the leading cause for eye-related hospital admissions.

A wonderful reminder about the importance of eye safety and the use of eye protection.

Ice Age 3 is a hyperkinetic family flick with a reasonable semblance of a plot pilfered from a great American author. There are a handful too many characters and their development subsequently suffers, but ultimately this forgettable movie achieves its modest goals. I'll give it a B - . Herman Melville's Moby Dick? An A - . Go dust off your high school copy, pull that bookmark out from Chapter 6, and give it another honest go.