Amnesia Minor

Amnesia Minor

Jacket, The (2005)

A soldier is shot in the head in The Gulf War (1991) leaving him with amnesia. Later back in the U.S. he is involved in a shooting and ends up in Alpine Grove Psychiatric Hospital for the criminally insane. There he is experimented upon by one of the doctors. Apparently the film is disappointing.
I have just seen this film and consider it very interesting. It is not about amnesia nor about mental illness though set mainly in a mental hospital. What it is about is something you will ponder at the end though I'm afraid it doesn't add up. The treatment the ex-soldier receives in the hospital which elicit his 'visions' is like something from the sixties or seventies. Restricted by a straightjacket he is put for hours on end in a mortuary drawer.
The film is good enough to hold your attention but not enough to leave you satisfied. You feel cheated when you realise the film is asking "what if". That is, what if you could change the future.
Despite so much being filmed in the hospital we see very little of conditions and treatment. The patients sleep in what resemble gaol cells and have communal areas in which they sit around doing very little. There is always the sense that the setting is the wrong time period further confused by the sliding about between past and future. At one point the main character, Starks, says something like 'the future is no different.'

www.imdb.com/title/tt0366627/

movie-reviews.colossus.net/movies/j/jacket.html

www.reel.com/movie.asp?MID=140352&buy=closed&PID=10119110&Tab=reviews&CID=18#tabs

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