tfstantonucdavisedu
I'm in awe, this movie is so pretentious yet falls down the avalanche of cliché until it finally crashes and burns. What is good about this movie? Well, the actors are trying with what they are given, and the shots are executed at a marginal level. The story has been seen a million times over. The story was written to be in the same vain as the room, but with tired themes of the darkness of the world from Apocalypse Now set in the Alaskan wilds. Sounds interesting..... It would be if the script worked and if pacing existed, but no. About the actors, those poor guys! They had to work with a script that would have been better written by the high school drama department, and give clichéd lines to push along a plot that failed to execute itself, even though we have seen it a million times in other films. Stay away from the timbers, It isn't even so Bad that its good.
tantry1
This ~73 minute movie (not counting the opening and closing credits) has a fair few scenes and characters that seem irrelevant to the plot and the characters are all very simple and have basically no internal conflicts. They throw in coincidences, mysticism and events to simply pad the running time.The core plot of the movie is a banker trying to get two brothers off their land by tricking them into paying their debt/mortgage by collecting a bounty when it's just a ruse to evict them unfairly because the land is valuable. That plot takes up maybe 10 minutes.The movie gets bogged down heavily in unnecessary side plots and issues, all of which are amazing coincidences and none of which seem important to the plot. There's a father no-one seems to care about positively or negatively that they just kill at the end, a soldier who burns some screen time doing very little and then dies, possibly- psychic dreams, a cannibal wild man and random attackers all seem inconsequential.The only consequence of all that stuff is they seem to be trying to deliver the deep message of the film: random people you don't know are bastards. It's all in these convoluted coincidence driven scenes that I think are meant to be kismet to teach this one brother that really obscure lesson.
Greg_Deane
Though the two brothers are on their way to kill their father they don't seem to suffer any angst over their task. The banker's reason for wanting them out of the way-to claim the oil on their farm-seems to be an afterthought that provides some sense to the plot. The gunslinger who accompanies them proves both ineffective and pointless. The father could be any of three people and an explosion that provides the brothers an opportunity to escape some uncertain but horrible fate is more serendipity than explicable. The story seems to be about nature and the wilderness which belittles the conflict between petty humans, though ultimately it seems as if nature is about to reward the morally superior humans, though there doesn't seem to be anything morally superior about them. All they did was mouth platitudes that their antagonists didn't mouth. I'm glad this film wasn't any longer.
Billy Rubin
This movie was pretty interesting and well-shot in some very scenic, snow-covered mountain locations; however, some of the scenes were a little too vague and unclear as to what actually happened. Perhaps the director wanted to "challenge" the audience in an artistic manner...or maybe the producer told the director to cut the time of the film by about thirty minutes; whatever the reason, the end result was a lot of scenes that didn't really make sense. There was a scene in a cave where it looked like someone got killed...but I'm not really sure who or why. There were several scenes that stopped just before the action started, only to show the aftermath later on, leaving the viewer to piece together what had happened. Overall, I still liked the film; it had a talented cast and an interesting plot.
AD
