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Reviewers failed to recognize implausible psychology of the cop. The police inspector in the novel, according to the review in "Sight and Sound," simply wanted to catch the big fish and showed little feeling for the child he used as bait. Such a character is too repellent to make a movie about, so the movie version "humanizes" the character by making him become attached to the mother and child, and indicates that he is concerned that the monster will kill another child. This concern would place him in a moral dilemma: should he use the child as bait in order to prevent the monster from killing more children? The movie does not deal with this: it presents him as subject to a compulsion or something of the sort, which is not interesting. Inner conflict is not shown and his behavior is not explained. His evidence would have to be very strong to compel him to use the little girl as bait, and the other cops would never have joined his crazy scheme, for at least three reasons: first, they didn't accept his suspicions; secondly, no one with children would consider putting a child at risk; and thirdly, if the trap had resulted in harm to the little girl, they would all have had to move to another planet. The mom showed up and said, "How could you do this?," which is what the other cops would have said. Some reviews saw the cop's journey as a "descent into madness", which is about as good as you can do with it, I guess, but it just makes the cop crazy instead of evil. The movie does not illuminate or deal with the psychological or moral issues, which is to say the makers were in over their heads.
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