DVD review: The Last Winter

The Last Winter is a sci-fi/horror film starring Ron Perlman, James LeGros, Connie Britton, Zach Gilford and Kevin Corrigan. Directed by Larry Fessenden.

Playing as a cross between John Carpenter’s The Thing and An Inconvenient Truth, Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter imagines the dawn of an environmental apocalypse at its origin, a remote outpost in the ANWR province. However, after a strong opening and some disturbing moments, the film starts to go slightly downhill, culminating in an ending that is both disappointing and incomplete. I was left waiting for a big payoff that never comes.

The story: ANWR has recently been opened for oil exploration by an energy-starved federal government (I have to give this film credit for its remarkable foresight). A small team is sent to the aforementioned outpost to explore for prime spots to drill. However, something is not right. It seems that mankind has pushed Mother Nature to the brink and she has had enough. Strange apparitions appear, equipment starts to falter and the sanity of the team members starts to fail as well.

Like The Thing, each member of the small team has his or her own distinct job and personality, with two characters dominant. Ron Perlman plays Pollack, the team leader who wants to keep his team happy, yet is focused on doing the job for his bosses and finding the oil. His polar opposite is the environmentalist watchdog Hoffman (James LeGros). Not surprisingly, the primary man vs. man conflict in the story is between Pollack and Hoffman, which is made even more tense since Hoffman has decided to start a romance with Abby Sellers (Connie Britton), Pollack’s 2nd in command (and sometime love interest, we suspect) during the few months Pollack was gone from the camp.

The first shots after the credits are beautiful, yet disturbing, as they perhaps should be. A pale sun sets across frozen tundra, as puffs of white whip across the land. These scenes not only set up the isolation that our protagonists will soon find themselves in, but also foreshadow the fate that awaits the characters (and all of us, seemingly).

The clear strength of this film is the images. The shots often alternate between the breathtaking (the vast, empty tundra, the Northern Lights) and the disturbing (a frozen, nude body in the snow, with his eyes plucked out, black crows emerging from nowhere to feast on the dead). However, I felt that too much of the film was focused on filming arresting visuals at the expense of story and character development. For instance, I’m sure that Pollack is meant to be the bad guy, while Hoffman, the environmentalist, is the good guy, yet unfortunately, I still liked Pollack more than Hoffman at the end (which I don’t think the film intended). Though Pollack is representing “Big Oil,” it seemes that he genuinely cares for his team and tries to live up to his responsibility as leader of the project (he also handles the fact that Sellers and Hoffman started to shack up with a great deal of grace). There were times near the end where Pollack makes some extremely stupid decisions that just felt forced: his poor judgment seemed to be the machinations of the screenplay trying to make sure we know he’s not the hero. I just could not buy that the character we have seen throughout most of the movie would make such poor decisions.

Also disappointing is the ending. Without giving it away, it involves some rather shabby CGI monsters (and poor CGI always ruins the tone of a film for me) and a final shot that seems to come out of nowhere and is rather poorly set up (I sort of “got” the ending, but it could have been made clearer without diluting the tone). The ending is not terrible, but is it definitely a let down from where the film seemed headed at the onset.

The Last Winter is still worth a rental for the visuals (remarkably strong for a low-budget “B” movie) and a solid cast (Perlman is always worth watching). The basic core of the story is also profound and relevant-we really could be near the point where Mother Earth turns against us. Indeed, I found certain plot points, such as the province being nearly above freezing and warm enough in ANWR in February to rain, as scary as any CGI monster. Perhaps that is part of the problem: if The Last Winter had been a little less The Thing and a bit more Inconvenient Truth, it might have actually been even scarier.

Extras:

• Subtitles include English for the hearing impaired and Spanish.
• Commentary track with the director.
• In-depth account of the making of the film.

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