Adama Brown A quick glance at the summary might convince you this is an environmentalist screed. It's not. Nor is it a horror movie. In general, it's a psychological thriller. It very much reminded me of 2007's "Sunshine," with a small group of people isolated together against the extreme environment around them, slowly being worn down towards insanity by the place and the events around them.For the first part, the movie struck an excellent balance between building tension by not showing you too much, and showing you enough to create real mystery, making you wonder what's next and what's really going on. Unfortunately, the ending doesn't fare as well. I think that they had a hard time finding a compromise between taking away the mystery, and going over the top with it. They seem to have tried to do a little of both, and it didn't turn out well.This is a great movie to see if you just want to savor the well executed wind-up as well as some great performances, and don't care that the last 20 minutes will probably leave you wanting. I don't regret watching it, but at the same time I'm not likely to watch it again.

devilmadeson The Last Winter seems to be a conscious update of Peter Weir's The Last Wave, both with themes of humans cracking under the strain of an environmental crisis. This doesn't cover substantially new territory, but succeeds in an atmosphere of dread, and events that leave you guessing: is the crew suffering from gas exposure? Hallucinations? Is a dark spirit from the Inuit mythology to blame? LW does a nice job of balancing these possibilities, letting you be the judge. Ron Perlman is good as the gruff, by the book boss who looks after his crew, James LeGros is a very serious environmentalist who is no more ready than the others for events that defy his rational mind, and several of the other characters, while needing a bit more depth, do good work with what they have. The film has been criticized for a rather vague ending, usually from the people who always want a big rubbery monster to show up and then get conveniently killed, resolving everything in an instantly forgettable climax. But, if you care to exercise that brain behind your eyes, you may find the questions of Last Winter lingering long after explosions and FX are forgotten.

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.

rball41139 It is set up in Northern Alaska with a crew that is supposed to be stalked by a unseen evil. After paying $10.00 for this movie and then setting and watching it for a 101 minutes, I ended up wasting money and time. This movie was awful I kept waiting and waiting for a scare or anything but it didn't deliver.When it finally tried to deliver it was if they were haunted by ghost moose???? You have to be kidding me. The special effects were even awful, they could have did a better job by far.Please do not waste your time or money on this movie.