The Last Winter
The Last Winter
PG-13 | 11 September 2006 (USA)
The Last Winter Trailers

In the Arctic region of Northern Alaska, an oil company's advance team struggles to establish a drilling base that will forever alter the pristine land. After one team member is found dead, a disorientation slowly claims the sanity of the others as each of them succumbs to a mysterious fear.

Reviews
Tuchergson

Truly the worst movie I've ever seen in a theater

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Libramedi

Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

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Inadvands

Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

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SparkMore

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

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Alex Pickard

To be honest I wasn't expecting much going into this film, yet was pleasantly surprised about it for about the first 45mins. As with all isolation movies, there is a profound sense of eeriness, and there are particular things (such as the box from the previous expedition, and a strange log book) which, I thought, were going to be good set ups for more mystery further on in the story. The acting wasn't by any means bad either. Ron Perlman was, well, Ron Perlman, and James Le Gros did fairly well as his opposite. It wasn't even that the characters were unlike-able or underdeveloped.But there certainly is a distinct point in the film where everything well and truly turns on its head. And from there it is all down hill.It actually baffles me completely that a film can go from eerie and interesting, to ridiculous and plain stupid like flipping a light switch. It was like the writers got to a point and said "hmm, we haven't killed many people yet. Probably should drop the storyline and do some character culling." Then proceeded to make completely irrational decisions that left you screaming at the screen in frustration. The biggest flaw in this film is that it never returns to the eeriness it started out with. Instead it decided it needed to go cliché and kill off characters in ways that were baffling. They never circle back to the set ups that they originally established, so leave you thinking 'well, what was the point'. And there is none!I am serious. The end of this movie has absolutely zero relation to the main storyline! And don't even get me started on the final shot. Whoever did that stroke of genius deserves a bullet. Overall my experience of this film went a lot like this: 'Cool. Oh yup. Hmm creepy. Oh yup. Ooo nice! Hmm, interesting. Wait, what? No seriously, what? WHY!? What the f**k. What the hell, just use the dead guys jacket!! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?? ....Are you serious. What,the,f**k. Let me guess, that's it? ...Yup damn. Well that was terrible.'As most people have stated, it was a film that showed serious potential but threw it all away by sticking its head up its own ass. Watch the first 45mins and walk away. At least the questions you have won't be shadowed by the unnecessary questions we are force fed at the end.

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GL84

When members of a remote Arctic drilling site begin behaving oddly and show signs they're potentially going insane, the few unaffected workers try to get the others to safety before they come face-to-face with the source of their condition.This one was an absolutely putrid and paltry effort that really offers very, very few areas of worthiness. One of the biggest offenders here is the absolute lack of urgency in trying to contain whatever it is they're facing at the site. This is mainly due to the fact that it's still never explained what's going on beyond just the ice-caps melting, but this is given explanations from a released Indian spirit rampaging and revenging them for the exploitation of it's land to the natural gases released during the exploration of the area, yet even if either of those situations is true, there's absolutely nothing from them to get out of the area at all, which is quite curious overall since there's certainly evidence of something going on and no one's reacting to it. Even moreso, hardly anything happens here to really indicate something's going on when it does occur, leaving this one so poorly paced that it's just so boring most of the time the lack of urgency comes across even more. The finale picks up considerably with a few decent action scenes and even some nice encounters with something, but it's just too little too late.Rated R: Graphic Language, Violence and off-screen sounds of sex.

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aelroth

From the DVD cover I was expecting a B-level horror-film-in-the-snow, style "30 Days of Night". This is not a horror film, which may explain why it has disappointed some reviewers here.This film is in fact more of a supernatural, environmental ghost story, combining an environmental theme to fantasy story-telling and form. In a nutshell, search and exploitation of natural resources cause damage to the environment, expose the characters to hidden, subterranean forces.The story is intriguing and original: an environmental theme, powerful and mysterious forces as in "The Mist" unleashed against the camp base standing for our consumer/industrial civilization. Similarily to "Monsters", we barely see these forces but thanks to an incredible sound design, they seem to be everywhere and appear from nowhere.The direction is strong from the beginning to the end and sometimes quite risk-taking. The Last Winter could maybe have gained more by departing from the classic Hollywood model, further in the direction it takes. Still this film is overall a very good surprise and I believe there is no other film like it. Highly recommended.

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Robert J. Maxwell

A slapdash combination of monster movie and environmentalist message movie, it has little to recommend it. Al Gore had been giving his popular presentation on global warming for a year or so and was to win an Academy Award for it in 2006, the same year this was released. It looks like a hastily put-together attempt to cash in on legitimate concerns about oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.A team of half a dozen or so, including an environmental scientist, are exploring the drilling possibilities in Northern Alaska. The team is diverse. There's an Inuit woman, a sexy woman, and various other characters led by the gruff and skeptical Ron Perlman.Look out for this spoiler. I feel compelled to add that warning although there's not much doubt that the seasoned viewer will be able to see the ending coming.One by one, something terrible happens to the team members. The first of them, a man, strips naked and walks off into the unending snow fields, after muttering about "something out there" and positing some kind of sour gas (hydrogen sulfide) seeping out of the ground. If he were correct about the gas, everybody would know about it. It has the smell of rotten eggs and turns nickels black. The next bleeds to death from his nose. By this time even Perlman is irritated and calls for help. Alas, the incoming airplane crashes into the base and burns everything up, including the occupants of the airplane and one or two more team members. The Eskimo woman goes nuts and apparently kills another team member, though I was a little confused by this time.The sexy woman, Connie Britton, who has a magnetic face without being the least conventionally beautiful, seems to be the sole survivor. She gives the best performance too. Perlman lapses into the common habit of delivering each use of the F word with emphasis, as if to underline its supposed shock value.All the way through the film, people have been murmuring about things being out there somewhere. Sometimes they glimpse a strange and inexplicable sight for an instant, too short a time to recognize it.What it is, is a herd of the most unlikely looking computer-generated ghoulish quadruped monsters you've ever seen or imagined. With that, any suspense or witchery fades into the white out. It might have been a much better movie if the writers and director had followed Val Lewton's example and left the monsters unseen -- or possibly imaginary -- instead of literal.But then a lot of possibilities are thrown away. This is a bleak and majestic landscape, filmed in Alaska and Iceland, and absolutely nothing is made of its pictorial potential. Imagine what David Lean would have done with such a location.And maybe this is a personal quirk, but I felt some resentment at the cheap attempt to cash in on a serious ecological problem. The issue is of such importance that it deserves better than this politically correct attempt to make money from it.

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