The Last Winter

The Last Winter_360P

I can't believe someone referred to this movie as 'gripping' & 'Jurassic Park meets The Shining' - have you even seen those movies?! Hilarious! And another reviewer exclaimed 'this is a director to watch out for' - no kidding, stay away! If you want a weird bore-fest of a movie which could have been sooooo much more, feel free to indulge yourselves, but be prepared to either 1. be confused at such a pointless storyline or 2. fall asleep at such a boring storyline. The choice is entirely yours of course, so don't feel pressured to choose one or the other. I got so excited about the setting of this story and that it had been labeled 'horror'. I now hate labels. The movie starts off well enough, with a team working for an oil company in Alaska, then the movie starts to get bad! During their time there, an environmentalist dude expresses his concerns about the climate changing and it's not a good idea to drill etc. (he should have been more concerned with the state of his facial hair) then one guy is curious about some random white box in the middle of nowhere (which could have been more of a focal point, as the DVD cover suggested!), which he goes to visit, alone. The next time he re-unites with his team mates, he is weird, disturbed (he probably just found out there is another 60 minutes of movie left) he then records himself in the *! then he goes outside and dies in the snow, yay! from then until the end of the movie, the rest of the team see ghost lamas or something galloping in the distance, one guy gets a nosebleed and dies, 2 men see ghost mooses and then for some reason, drop dead. At a guess, it is supposed to be about nature taking revenge on man for drilling it for oil. That's all i could make out, that and the fact who ever made this film is loco. If you like '30 days of night' or 'the thing', you'll hate this because it's nothing like it, it's boring and weird and nothing really happens! Don't watch it!

I want the minutes of my life back! This has got to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Firstly it was about an hour into the movie before anything happened and when it did it wasn't scary. I kept watching thinking anything this dull has to have an interesting ending, but it didn't! Oh and the creatures are what exactly? Moose ghosts?? So tell me if I have the story right........ Basically really old snow that contains the soul's of moose ghosts is melting due to global warming and when an oil company drills a hole it releases these evil moose ghosts to go around killing people and sending them crazy? My 4 year old could write a better story!

Okay, nothing much to say here that hasn't already been said by all the other good reviewers on here. Director does a cracking job of building up a sense of tension, isolation and paranoia in the first half of the film. Beautiful, haunting location shots, spot-on musical score and some clever camera-work. Undoubted nods to the likes of 'The Thing', 'Blair With Project' and 'The Shining' but the director still manages to plant enough plot devices (mysterious white box, weird noises and footprints, well-acted descent into madness) to promise a worthwhile outcome. Sadly, at this point they run out of ideas. In fact if I didn't know better, I'd almost have thought that they switched directors about two-thirds in. Particular gripes: 1) Rubbish CGI. You do NOT need a monster to make your movie scary. Especially when it's some sort of reject from Rocky & Bullwinkle. 2) The whole final scene. Been watching Resident Evil have we? The very final shot screams that they's completely run out of money and couldn't afford to do the apocalyptic wide angle shot that was needed here. 3) Poorly done switch in pace. About two thirds in we go from slow, deliberate menace to frantic, unexplained chaos. Handled well this might have worked. It didn't. Reading this back it sounds really negative and that's not the impression I want to give. This was a decent movie and I suppose my annoyance is that it wasn't as good as it easily could have been given a bit more care and thought.

Somewhere during Christmas week where its winter over here, i sat and decided to see this movie only to realise that it was a good choice. Its about some oil drilling corporation unit sent to some part of Iceland to drill oil.It concentrates on a white box like structure throughout. When one of the crew members hallucinates presumably due to the release of sour gas and dies in the cold the others realise that there's something wrong with a lot of weird things happenings with no explanation.This movie gives out an important message which is not clearly shown in fact it is hidden and left for you to figure out. The Last Winter is about how nature takes revenge on man for misusing it and taking it for granted.This movie tests your thinking level and how about you perceive things.If you don't understand it you wont find what message this movie is revealing to us and perhaps foolish;but if you see it in a different way and think accordingly(i mean just think a little bit more) you will find its a masterpiece. This is one of the best natural horror films.Truly,very gripping and engaging.This ones a must watch.Simply exceptional and outstanding. A new revolution created in Hollywood cinema.

"The Last Winter" is a very moody film with a lot going for it in terms of having a great theme, interesting camera work, good acting and a strong cast. The director did a good job of setting up the story and following through the major plot points of horror movie structure, ala "The Thing," or "The Shining." I was pretty much with it all the way until... ahem... suddenly, Bullwinkle appeared. Come on guys, this CGI stuff just doesn't cut it on this scale. This movie would have been that much better and more mysterious had the "monsters" never appeared. I am trying to give credit where credit is due here, but didn't anyone say no to the glowing green moose-monster in a preview?

Larry Fessenden's "The Last Winter" is a ambitious and smartly made film. It's photographed beautifully and (by and large) acted with conviction and sensitivity. Though the central conceit about nature "taking revenge" is pretty corny, the atmosphere is also pretty compellingly bleak, and the tension mounts pretty effectively as things go from bad to worse. Sadly, as many other reviewers note, the ending throws it all away in a fit of awful CG monsters. However, try turning it off right at one hour 27 minutes and 30 seconds. This would have been a solid albeit ambiguous ending; if you must watch further do it on a second viewing and consider it a deleted ending. It's just goofy and pointless, and the final "twist" at the end is telegraphed almost from the very beginning (in fact, one character early on describes aloud exactly what the twist will end up being). Even without the ending, the script has problems with its petty black-and-white portrayal of heroic environmentalist and selfish oil guy. An ensemble atmosphere pic like this lives and dies on the believability of its characters; Perlman's Ed Pollock is simply too villainous to really be convincing, despite a few nice touches of humanity which Perlman brings to him. Le Gros' Hoffman is also a pretty unengaging hero, a blandly heroic saint of a guy who's always right about everything. I'm a serious environmentalist and a left-leaning guy, but the film's literal take on the situation (the dire warnings of natural disaster, the clear heroes and villains) is shallow at best and preachy and patronizing at the worst. It plays to the most obnoxiously self-congratulatory nature of people concerned with the issues presented here, while at the same time offering nothing of any real substance. Still, the film itself is a pretty fun watch, and a definite step up from Fessenden's previous effort, the ambitious but amateurish "Wendigo" (the titular spirit of which gets name-checked here too!). Great photography combined with naturalistic acting from the likes of Kevin Corrigan and Zach Gilford do much to sell the vibe of the thing, and the setting and slow escalation of the action also add to the experience. Regardless of its stumbles, the film has loads of ambition to do something substantial and enduring, so even when it can't quite deliver on its promise it still beats the slew of cheap-scare horror remakes which every year become more numerous.

Eco horror film about the advance team from an oil company finding that the Alaskan wilderness is turning against it. Ten years earlier a test well had been drilled and what it found was kept secret. Now after years of negotiations and behind the scenes dealing the advance group from Northern Industries is preparing the way for full scale drilling. Arriving back from headquarters big wig Ron Perlman finds things are beginning to go amiss. The temperature is climbing despite it being February, its raining and more than one of the people in his crew is acting strange. Well made and well acted this film works for about 45 minutes until one of the crew, who had gone mysteriously missing, begins to go on about strange forces and "don't you see it". No we don't. And thats the problem. much of this film we don't see anything. To be certain we do see the guy wander into the waste and freeze to death and we see his lifeless corpse moved around, and we see the ominous animals,we see the deaths and we hear the scary words about the planet in revolt, but we don't see anything that makes sense. For whatever reason none of it makes a whole hell of a lot of sense. Its formless dread that never takes form, and while our lives are often controlled by it, you can't make a movie about it. To be honest I started not to pay attention in the last 35 or 40 minutes. The mood was good, but it just wasn't scary because the reason for the fear, other than clever film-making, was missing. I'll try it again down the road, but for now I consider it a misfire. (Also in fairness a friend at work really really liked it)

I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to say about this one. It's loaded with so much promise - a cast of engaging characters; a bleak, isolated setting; slow-burn direction that builds a creepy atmosphere. But that's where the good stuff ends. The plot (or lack thereof) seems to involve the deaths of the aforementioned characters in random, arbitrary ways with no explanations offered. A few "ecological revenge" lines are thrown but they do little to clue the viewer in to what's actually supposed to be going on. To be completely honest - I don't think even the writer and director knew what was going on. I get the feeling they said: "Hey let's make this creepy film set in an arctic drilling station, kinda like 'The Thing'..." "Cool, so what's the plot?" "Ummm, I don't know, I don't think it matters. Characters can die!" "Cool, so what's killing them?" "Ummm, I don't know, I don't think it matters." "I guess not. Let's get started then!"

The setting is bleak, white and, of course, isolated. A remote drilling station with company employees waiting things out. Then something starts happening. Another reviewer pegged it nicely as a mix of "The Shining" with a little bit of 'The Thing" and you have a flavor of what this movie is like. What's nice is that there isn't the usual pot boiler about some secret military base, or some evil corporate shenanigans. The characters are the normal sorts of people who actually would work in this kind of remote, exploratory/drilling outpost. And I especially like the music/camera work they did in one segment. . .visually lyrical. And the 'Whatever it is"? I still don't have the darnedest idea!! That's what makes this movie a nice horror treat. Yes, there's a global warming message in there-- but this isn't an environmentalist groupie movie trying to hit you over the head. Global warming is just one of the ingredients. But overall. . .spooky.