An In Depth Look at the Forrest Scene Part 2 In the last review, I described all the cumulating factors that made the scene between Monica and David, which is supposed to be sad, more confusing than anything else. I encourage you to read part four of this series to better understand these factors, but for now, I will summarize what’s happened. Monica has decided to leave David in the woods rather than send him back to the factory to be destroyed. There’s a lot of crying, and the actors do a wonderful job depicting the scene. But in the background of all this, there are multiple issues taking place at once. First is the thesis: “Nobody knows what ‘real’ really means.” The audience is supposed to accept that David is already real as a result of an imprinting procedure. He’s connected to his mother with something like an emotional Bluetooth and now really feels love. So, from the movie’s perspective, David is real because he acts real. His longing has made him real—this assumes he already longs, …

 An In Depth Look at the Forrest Scene Part 1 In the previous review, I talked about the final event—the pool party—which led to Monica eventually leaving David in the forest with Teddy. I mentioned one of the obvious problems with the sequence—the lack of attempts made to fix David before abandoning him—but I only alluded to the main issue because the subject is surprisingly complicated. The forest scene itself is just shy of three minutes, and the actors both do a wonderful job selling the scene, but in the end, I couldn’t buy it. This scene is meant to bring the audience to tears, but I only felt confused and a little irritated. It’s taken multiple attempts at writing down my thoughts to really articulate why. To grasp what went wrong during this scene, I must first rewind a bit and discuss what we’ve seen thus far. The basic issue is that there are multiple conflicting plot points coming to a head here. This makes for a very confusing scene, despite the actors’ tears. First, we must begin by …