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Last Winter (The)
R1 - America - Genius Products Review written by and copyright: Jeremiah Chin (21st July 2008). |
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The Film
 It gets worrisome when the blurbs on a DVD case start to boast quotes like “Three and a half stars!” not just because they’re putting sub-perfection in blurbs that are usually milked for all the hyperbole and exaggeration that you can possibly afford. It’s more the fact that the reviewer or the DVD producers were so excited about those three and a half stars they had to put an exclamation point, just to show you how emphatic that last half star was. Larry Fessenden’s “The Last Winter” (2006) proudly sports its three and a half star blurb, exclamation point and all, and does a fair job of living up to that high (half) standard. The film begins with a promotional video/exposition for a United States Oil Drilling company that has set up a surveying station in a remote section of Alaska in order to see if the area is ready to begin drilling after congress has decided to allow drilling in the controversial Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) oversees the company’s expedition and survey, keeping the company’s best interest first in his mind, while James Hoffman (James LeGros) is more concerned about the oddly shifting environmental conditions. Things take a turn for the weird after Maxwell McKinder (Zach Gilford) goes missing after visiting the primary potential drilling site and turns back up with a fairly serious case of the crazy and things take a turn for the weird. Visually, Fessenden does a good job of exploring the setting, getiving a good feel of the isolation and the almost blinding emptiness from the snowy surroundings. There are some fairly obvious references to John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982) visually, but Fessenden does a good job of not going too far into the homage territory since there’s almost no way to improve on the kind of mood that Carpenter created. When the craziness that overtook Maxwell starts to spread to the rest of the crew, Fessenden again does a fairly good job of visually showing the bizarre goings on. However, the way the movie builds into crazy territory, there needs to be a willingness to go all out. Fessenden, both in the script and in the directing, spends too much time testing the waters, showing flashes of crazy or weird, then quickly toning it back down, then ramping it all the way back op. No tension really gets built up as the small plateaus between spikes of craziness become uninteresting and almost frustrating near the end of the movie. The mystery surrounding the cause of the craziness and possibly the presence of some monsters aren’t fully explained, but get fully shown at the end of the movie and just leave me feeling that some things are better left implied. Ron Perlman and a few of the actors do an okay job, but no standout performances. Either the script or the actors decided to opt for a more calm and quiet kind of crazy, but with the level of bizarre that Fessenden eventually delves into it doesn’t seem to match up. Gore-wise, the bodies start to add up at the remote station and there are some okay deaths, some good practical makeup on the bodies, but nothing really for the serious gore hound as the blurbs on the DVD case would have you believe. Underlying the entire message of the movie is an obvious environmental subtext, dealing with global warming and debates about the spread of an “atmospheric abnormality” and some odd animal behavior in the wilderness. The movie wanders dangerously towards preaching to the audience about some of these issues, but does a fairly good job of walking the line until near the end where it almost forgets about the issue itself in trying to favor the odd and sudden jerks into the land of the bizarre. Overall, it’s a fairly interesting movie, but just doesn’t go the distance in delivering on any of the surreal or horror elements of the movie and as a result just becomes unintentionally absurd.
Video
The video looks good in the anamorphic 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio it’s presented in, the transfer looks good especially in the outdoor scenes that are blindingly bright and give a good sense of the geography. There’s some graininess in some of the low light scenes that are presumably from post production that make some of them oddly stick out, but doesn’t interfere too much with the movie itself.
Audio
The English Dolby Digital 5.1 track is used effectively in setting the tone of the movie, between the walkie-talkies with strange static and the creepy ambient noises, the sound adds a lot to the movie. Quality-wise, all of the levels match up very well, the sound effects are quiet when they need to be or conversely jarring when necessary. Optional subtitles are included in both English for the hearing impaired and Spanish.
Extras
Genius has release this disc with the core special features, a documentary, an audio commentary track and some bonus trailers. The audio commentary track features co-writer/director/editor Larry Fessenden who does a fair job of talking throughout the entire movie, at times there’s long stretches of uninteresting trivia, but he does some good talking about the production of the movie that are fairly interesting. His voice isn’t the most excited or engaging and spends a little too much time talking about his actors, but his discussion of the characters makes the movie more interesting and just should have been in the script. The DVD cover boasts a feature-length documentary, which played all together runs for 1 hour 59 minutes and 35 seconds, but isn’t cohesively peiced together and is broken down into featurette-chapter-selections on the disc, so I’ll break them down that way: - “Location Scout” runs for 9 minutes and 14 seconds, a lot of just low quality handheld camera footage going through different areas where the movie was shot, no commentary by the director, just the direct scouting footage with some weird interviews with un-named people. - “Development” runs for 2 minutes and 27 seconds, almost as frustrating to listen to as the first segment in terms of audio quality, some talk about the politics of the movie and the development of the “Wendigo” (2001) characters and some animatics. - “Pre-Production” runs for 10 minutes and 5 seconds, the most interesting part is some discussion with the production designers on the sets and the practical effects, like the mannequins built for dead bodies, again, entirely on-set behind the scenes footage, but it doesn’t really move interestingly. - “Myvatn Shoot” runs for 28 minutes and 38 seconds, interviews with actors and behind the scenes footage, but since it’s mostly on set and there’s not a lot to cohere the whole piece together it gets fairly tedious after about 10 minutes, there’s some behind the scenes shots that I just never really needed to see. - “Reykjavik Shoot” runs for 38 minutes and 24 seconds, another huge amount of behind the scenes footage, almost too much to handle, there’s a ton of sections that are just shots of the actors and director watching the monitor, almost too far behind the scenes, not interesting at all. People do things, but there’s never really any explanation or any kind of aspect to really engage me. - “Deleted Scenes” runs for 6 minutes and 7 seconds, all the scenes are lumped together into one featurette, some of them are just incidental, like walking through a doorway, not even full scenes. There’s more characterization for Joanne Shenandoah’s character, including some guitar playing and some explanation of her take on all the oddities going on. - “Interview with co-writer/director Larry Fessenden” runs for 13 minutes and 13 seconds and Fessenden talks about how independent he is, his emotions in filming and some of the premiers and release potential of the movie. However, there’s a lot of wind in some parts of the interview that blows right into the microphone so it’s really hard to hear what he’s saying, but he seems a lot more energized in the interview than he was in the commentary. There are also two startup bonus trailers for: - “Out of the Blue” runs for 1 minute and 3 seconds. - “Paranoid Park” runs for 2 minutes and 13 seconds.
Overall
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