THE OBJECTIVE
(Review)

“My name is Benjamin Keynes. I work for the Directorate of Operations within the Central Intelligence Agency.
“Three days after 9/11, reconnaissance satellites picked up a radioactive heat signature in a remote tribal region of Afghanistan.
“The Agency feared that Al-Qaeda may have finally gotten their hands on a nuclear weapon. However, I was told by a local source with a high degree of confidence that it may be something much more powerful.”

After the disappointment that was Solstice (review in Archive), I put a lot of stock on The Objective as a film that would turn me around on Daniel Myrick.
I’m glad to report that it does.


We open in Ghazni Province, the date, November 2001.
Benjamin Keynes (The Killing of John Lennon’s Jonas Ball) has been tasked by the CIA to lead Special Forces Team 392 on a mission deep into Afghanistan to find one Mohammed Aban, a cleric considered by the locals to be the “spiritual force that helped the Mujahadeen defeat the Soviets.”
All else is on a need-to-know basis, and it’s this veil of military secrecy that fuels the mystery of The Objective.

Co-writing the script with Mark A. Patton and Wesley Clark, Jr., Myrick successfully captures the feeling of a squad of soldiers in enemy territory, off on a trek whose exact nature is kept from them by the Powers That Be (of which Keynes is the on-the-ground representative).
Assisted by DP Stephanie Martin, Myrick conjures the harsh beauty of the inhospitable terrain of this foreign country, effectively utilizing Morocco as locale stand-in, while Kays Al-Atrakchi’s music drapes the film’s soundscape with a disturbing score that heightens the scenario’s unsettling strangeness.
It’s these elements more than anything else—elements certainly more potent than your average Hollywood thriller’s over-dependence on CGI and epileptic editing—that make The Objective such a noteworthy triumph.


There’s also a good cast here, made up of unfamiliar faces, who deliver largely natural, straight-forward performances, which is, in the end, the key to keeping the audience involved while the weird sh!t gradually asserts itself over the film’s goings-on.
Do they reek the Hollywood hardcase Special Forces air we’ve come to expect from the movies and television? Perhaps not, but they do come across as real people, and that’s a big plus for a film like this.

Beyond that, I really shouldn’t say much more, other than that The Objective is ultimately about a government’s hunger for power, and how all else falls by the wayside in light of that all-encompassing yearning for the upper hand.
And while this isn’t the sort of film where everything’s neatly underlined and explained—the atmosphere and tantalizing bits are the tools for the audience to piece together the big picture—this is a solid cinematic experience which plays much better than The Blair Witch Project (which Myrick co-directed with Eduardo Sánchez), and is decidedly light years better than Solstice.
Now, I’m most definitely looking forward to Myrick’s next film.


Parting shot: Aside from containing a review of Solstice, the Archive also houses a review of Eduardo Sánchez’s Altered.

(The Objective OS courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com and images courtesy of availableimages.com.)

SOLSTICE
(Review)

Still bearing the guilt and the grief of her twin Sophie’s suicide, Megan Thomas (Point Pleasant’s Elisabeth Harnois) takes a trip to her parents’ house on Nowell Lake in Louisiana, for the traditional celebration of St. John’s Eve, on the summer solstice.
This year’s celebration is the last of its kind though, as the Thomases are planning to sell the place, so Megan and her friends intend to have a last hurrah.
But something lurks at Nowell Lake, and Megan becomes increasingly convinced she is being haunted by the spectre of her dead sister.


That’s the basic set-up of Daniel Myrick’s Solstice, which, other than a creepily effective opening titles sequence, doesn’t quite manage to hit the right buttons.
To be fair, it is a good thing that the script (by Myrick, Marty Musatov, and Ethan Erwin) doesn’t degenerate into a pretty-young-things-being-slaughtered-one-by-one deal.
There is a mystery here, though it’s approached in a rather awkward manner, and the film takes a tad too long to really get moving.


Given what the film is ultimately about, there also seems to be an overabundance of characters here, many of whom are left to stand around with nothing particularly significant to do.
Among the narrative’s dead weight are Mamma Mia!’s Amanda Seyfried and Hilarie Burton, who joins the likes of her fellow One Tree Hillers Sophia Bush and Chad Michael Murray, as well as Harnois (who did a 6-episode stint on the Hill), in their transition to feature-length horror.
Those fortunate enough to have been given just a little bit more to do though, are the X-Men franchise’s Shawn Ashmore (as Christian, former boyfriend of the deceased Sophie) and 7th Heaven’s Tyler Hoechlin (as Nick, local Cajun boy who knows a thing or two about ghosts and magic).
R. Lee Ermey’s also here as Leonard, the creepy old codger who lives across the lake.


It’s that surfeit of mostly unnecessary characters, and the film’s annoying red herrings, that make Solstice’s script the major culprit here.
Which is sad since I was hoping Myrick (co-director of The Blair Witch Project, with Eduardo Sánchez) could convince me that he could helm an effective horror film minus any shakycam improv and with an actual script, as Sánchez did with Altered.
Instead, what we get in Solstice is a lukewarm ghost story that doesn’t really scare or thrill. Doubly sad, since there’s so much narrative potential in the idea of the solstice, of that temporal transition, where the barriers between the quick and the dead are weaker than normal.
Here’s hoping Myrick wins me over with his upcoming The Objective…


Parting shot: A review of Eduardo Sánchez’s Altered can be found in the Archive.

(Solstice DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com; images courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com.)

ALTERED (Review)

ALTERED
(Review)

Brought to us by the Eduardo Sánchez half of the directing duo behind The Blair Witch Project, Altered kicks off with a night-time hunt conducted by three rednecks, who manage to bag their quarry, something that is definitely not a regular animal.
What happens from that point onward, as well as the pivotal event that set all of this in motion, informs the rest of Altered, a very effective, old school, low-budget science fiction/horror movie that, though marginally flawed, plays so much better than Project.
For one thing, we’re actually given real, significantly more substantial characters to consider, and that makes a world of difference.

Jamie Nash’s script (from a story by Nash and Sánchez) effectively paints a group of once-friends, all still tied together by their traumatic past. Think something along the lines of Sleepers, but with a genre bent, with some freakiness and gore thrown in for good measure.
Nash puts together a script that keeps the thrills at just the right pitch, while simultaneously giving us the impression that that singular moment in these men’s shared past has indeed affected the trajectory of their very lives, and is the sole reason that has brought them here, to this night which we see chronicled in Altered.

Additionally, the performances--by Without A Trace’s Adam Kaufman, October Road’s Brad William Henke, Project’s Mike C. Williams, Paul McCarthy-Boyington, and Catherine Mangan--are commendable, more honest and textured than your average genre movie, with the rapport of the principals palpable on the screen.
Sánchez also keeps the mystery intriguing and involving, as the narrative gradually unwinds, slowly letting us in on exactly what’s going on, as well as what went on, a decade and a half ago, that brought us to this very moment. He also gamely proves that he can do wonders with an actual script and not some gimmicky combo of shaky cam and clever marketing.


As much as I enjoyed Altered though, it’s still not all goodness and light.
There are moments when, in the stalwart aim of keeping the tension going, the film’s principal setting--a house--seems to be far larger than it should be, as individuals (and other things) seem to lose themselves for varying stretches of running time.
The narrative also has the annoying tendency of having things go from bad to worse because of dumb-a$$ decisions. Granted, they’re not the sort of decisions made out of stupidity, but rather those made based on emotion, but when they happen repeatedly, the distinct urge to yell at the on-screen idiots is difficult to keep a lid on.

Still, when all is said and done, Altered is a neat little genre trip that’s worth your time and attention, something to perhaps occupy your time while we all await Sánchez’s follow-up, Seventh Moon, starring Amy Smart, and again written by Jaime Nash.

There’s also The Objective to look forward to, the new film from the Daniel Myrick half of Project.
Hopefully, both movies will be as good--or even better--than this one.

(Altered DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com; image courtesy of blogcritics.org.)