Can someone tell me how he could see Tess if she wasn't dead? That made no sense.
shareShe was between life and death kind, of like Charlie was at the beginning when he and Sam got in the car accident.
sharethey said it was like a crisis apparition.
shareWatch the movie the invisible. Its very similar
shareI think Charlie can communicate with unconscious persons who have had an strong emotional bond with him. Not necessarily or exclusively dead people.
sharemaybe next time put spoilers in the title
shareAs noted above, and explained in the DVD bonus materials, Tess was a "crisis apparition" not a dead apparition. Apparently, when someone is in a life or death crisis, they can also project an apparition. The fact that this is explained in the bonus materials and not in the movie shows one of the movie's weaknesses. How such an apparition could be physically involved with Charlie is not explained in the movie or the DVD bonus materials.
Poltergeist had a medium who came in and explained what was happening and aid the clueless victims; Dracula had Van Helsing to explain what was going on and save the day. Poor Charlie St. Cloud, and his movie audience, had no one to advise them.
I think it was made pretty clear when he tells her she's in the inbetween. Not trying to be mean, just saying.
Kind of like the movei Just like Heaven where Mark Ruffalo's character can see Reese Witherspoon yet she's not dead.
yeah i think the "in-between" explanation was enough. this movie isn't so much about the physics of apparitions as the connections between people and why some live or die. this was partly also to keep the real twist hidden (and why this thread should have a BIG SPOILER WARNING).
besides, they even shot a new scene to confirm that the encounter really happened (scene where Charlie invites Tess onto the boat), even if it wasn't in physical reality (Charlie's "Sun" boat never left the warehouse).
the story was still very decent, though perhaps not revolutionary or anything superlative.
Is it really one of the film's weaknesses? Just because the film didn't spoon-feed you the explanation? I guess you're right, the majority of modern day movie-goers are just too stupid to work out anything complex in a film. They need everything explained to them so they don't have to hurt their brains by thinking too hard.
share"They need everything explained to them so they don't have to hurt their brains by thinking too hard."
In this case an explanation is needed, because thinking hard doesn't help -- there's no logical explanation for why Charlie can see Tess when she isn't dead. Nothing in the movie prior to this event has set us up to understand that there is more than one kind of apparition. The very fact that this question appears on this board shows there is a problem.
[deleted]
I'm sorry, but I put this in the category of some people just need all the details spoon fed to them. They give you all the explanations you need, if you are willing to look for them. Why can Charlie see Sam in the first place? Charlie, as he says in the film, was technically dead himself. He tells Tess that he himself saw the light. He was "inbetween", if only for a few moments. The audience is left to assume that it is this occurance that allows him to see and talk to Sam and his friend, the marine lieutenant. It therefore is not that difficult to understand that if Tess is clinging to life somewhere that if Charlie has this "supernatural" ability, therefore it could extend to other people he has an emotional attachment to who have entered some type of inbetween state, whether that is exactly the same as Sam's or not. I mean, we are talking about something outside the realm of normal human understanding. There are no "rules". So therefore, how can you say that this breaks a rule?
Yep.
To each their own...opinion
"There are no 'rules'?"
Yet you offer an explanation for how Charlie could see Sam: he was "technically dead" or "inbetween," suggesting that there are some rules to his "supernatural ability."