Ravenous
I saw this little ditty at the behest of my brother in law. He and I share a like-minded movie sensibility, so of course I was interested. The only thing he told me about the movie was that it took place in ‘western’ times. Ok, good enough for me! I had a look at the cast list and was impressed. A lot of actors I like are in this flick, including Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle, Jeffrey Jones, Jeremy Davies, and even Neil McDonough.
The story goes like this: Guy Pearce plays Captain John Boyd, who has been promoted due to his heroic efforts in capturing an enemy stronghold, or so what his superiors thought was heroic. All is revealed on this early on, and it builds up our lead character nicely.
He arrives at his new station, Fort Spencer, where he meets the crew he’ll be working with, which is more or less a skeleton crew, as winter sees little action at their post. The crew working at Ft. Spencer is quite an ecclectic bunch, and they all fit perfectly within the framework of the film, even if we don’t get to spend a lot of time with all of them as viewers.
He looks more confused than Ravenous.
It’s not too long until a strange man appears at the camp, slightly frostbitten, but still pretty healthy. He tells them the story of how his party have been trapped in the woods for weeks, living in a cave, and he somehow found his way down the mountains. His story goes into more details, but to tell would be spoiling, and that’s something I’m not going to do…this time.
Members of the team accompany the stranger back up the mountain to hopefully find the rest of his party alive and rescue them. It’s around this time that the movie stops building up character and dives into the meat of the plot.
While this flick is predictable, it is entirely fun. You see, the first half hour or so it plays itself as a fairly serious movie, with the mystery of our hero, as well as the stranger, but once things start happening, and the action presents itself, the movie changes. It becomes a bit more light hearted, and almost satirical at times. Of course, the use of music is key to a lot of these scenes. During a tense chase scene, the music is almost comical, and you’re thinking, ‘this doesn’t go’, but then you quickly realize that it DOES go.
He looks Ravenous!
No sooner do you come to that realization, when it suddenly stops altogether and you get very low, somber tones, as the movie has dove down now, and things get serious and tense again, only to pick back up and begin with the farcical music again. It sounds weird, and it is a bit, but it is also very well done. It certainly pulled me in different directions, which I feel is the intent, to keep you off balance in hopes of knocking you down. In truth, the soundtrack to this movie is really good and works as a great compliment to the visuals.
In spite of all that I’ve mentioned about this movie, there are also some very interesting thought provoking subtleties, such as morality, addiction, and human nature. Of course, some of them you may have to look a bit deeper for, while others are readily apparent. I think that this is one drawback to the movie; that it needed MORE. I felt that it needed to to explore some of these themes are bit more. Even still, they are not buried THAT deep within the movie, but there are some points in the movie where I felt it could have benefited from having a bit more dialog between the actors, just to flesh out a few things that were kind of only lingering.
While I haven’t given a lot about this movie, I think if you like any of the cast members, you should certainly give it a view. There’s worse movies out there, for sure, and those worse movies take themselves a little too seriously, whereas this flick is fun, a bit gorey, and has a fair amount of camp.
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