The Objective and post-9/11 horror movies set in Afghanistan

Movies
1

I’m surprised that War on Terror horror movies are set in Afghanistan instead of Iraq, but that’s the case with the only two contemporary military/horror movies I can think of: The Objective and Red Sands.

Red Sands is from the guy who did a freaky “Reservoir Dogs meets The Ring but set in the Civil War” mash-up called Dead Birds, which was actually pretty decent, even if it did overly rely on a tired gimmick: walking up slowly…to someone…whose back…is to you…and then they turn…around and…OHGOD HISFACE ITSAFREAKY (COMPUTERGENERATED) ZOMBIE-DEMON-MONSTER THING!!!1!!

But Red Sands is horrible. There’s no budget, so the movie just has soldiers getting possessed by evil spirits and killing each other. Oh, spoiler, I guess. The script is crap, the actors are all weak (they got JK Simmons for what looks like a few hours of work), and the few CG shots are laughably bad. There’s a single cool CG shot that would have been awesome in a better movie. That shot alone made the movie worth watching, but I don’t expect a lot from my terrible horror movies.

That’s partly why I really really like The Objective, which is in the category of terrible horror movies. It’s no-budget, most of the actors are bad, it doesn’t look very good, and its pretty derivative at times. But it’s mostly smart, it’s got a solid story, it’s based on something you don’t normally see in horror movies, and the lead actor is really good. And, unlike 99% of horror films, it doesn’t completely collapse by the time its over. In fact, the ending made the movie for me.

I saw a screening of The Objective a while ago and was dismayed to learn that no one had picked it up for distribution. It did a few film festivals and essentially died. However, it’s just gotten a very small second breath. It’ll have one of those sad week-long limited releases in a single theater in New York next week, and then a single theater in Los Angeles next month. My guess is that the producers basically rented out the theaters and are hoping to get some sort of DVD deal out of it.

It’s Daniel Myrick’s first legitimate follow-up to the promise he and Edward Sanchez showed with Blair Witch Project, which shouldn’t be surprising, considering how much The Objective has in common with Blair. Myrick has been messing around doing a few awful movies, so I had low expectations here that were certainly exceeded.

But on the off chance that anyone gets to see it, I don’t want to get into spoiler territory. So that stuff will go in the following post, which you shouldn’t read yet if you have any expectation of getting to see The Objective.

-Tom

P.S. Oh, and whatever you do, don’t watch the frickin’ trailer for The Objective. It will sap every iota of discovery out of the movie.

2

In a way, part of the weakness of The Objective is that it’s so derivative of Blair Witch Project, and not just in terms of being a no-budget horror movie that can’t afford to show anything. The whole “lost in the scary wilderness” schtick is familiar. Myrick even re-uses the stick figure gimmick. Consider too the theme of attempting to document a legendary horror using a camera, which is the central point of Blair Witch Project and The Objective, although it’s the premise of Blair and it’s a reveal in The Objective. But unlike his other movies since Blair, Myrick is in comfortable territory here. He knows this stuff, and it shows.

And that’s a lot of why I liked it. This is the smarter contemporary follow-up to Blair Witch Project. The twist – that the objective wasn’t the Vimanas themselves, but that the fate of whoever made contact with them would be documented – was really clever. There’s even a bit of HP Lovecraft in the way Keynes is following up on the tale of a madman, Mohammad Aban, who never appears in the movie, but is referenced. I presume that’s Aban’s finger that touched Keynes at the end of the movie.

The few set pieces Myrick manages are mostly good. I’m not really clear on the presumed logic of some of it. The ghost firefight that inflicts the first casualty didn’t seem to make much sense. Certainly not as much sense as stuff like the water turning to sand or the way the light instantly dessicated the men. As with any desert mythology, being deprived of water figured prominently into both of those moments. I was really disappointed that they couldn’t do something more spectacular with the Hill of Bones discovery, which was a few spare bones stuck in the dirt. Come on, guys, that was supposed to be a pay-off shot. :(

The supporting cast was pretty weak, and The Objective would have been a magnitude of order better if the actor playing the leader of the elite soldiers wasn’t so bad. Because Jonas Bell as Keynes and even the guy playing the Afghani guide were very good. The showdown between Keynes and the chief could have been as important as it was supposed to be.

Bell, in fact, was fascinating. It was a bit hard to get over how much he sounded like Edward Norton, but once I got into the movie, he really carried it. I could even almost buy that he’d been in Afghanistan training the mujaheddin ten years ago. When the tribal leader tells him he has “the desert in his eyes”, it wasn’t laughable, which would have been the case with just some pretty-boy playing the role. Bell really does look creepy and haunted (interestingly enough, his only other film role is playing Mark David Chapman in The Killing of John Lennon). And without him, that awesome last shot and the close-ups on his face wouldn’t have been as memorable as they were.

-Tom

3

i’ve been meaning to catch something at the IFC Center since i moved here, so this sounds like the perfect opportunity

thanks for the write up

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You should put the word “next” in front of “post” in your sentence, “So that stuff will go in the post, which you shouldn’t read yet if you have any expectation of getting to see The Objective” because without it I just kept reading thinking you’d run out of characters for the first post or something, and, well… dammit.

I liked Dead Birds, and would recommend it for folks. I do give it some leeway for being a low budget movie, but even given that, it’s quality stuff.

5

Argh, my bad, rasputin. Of all the typos to make…

-Tom
6

No prob, I stopped myself after the first paragraph or so. I’ll still check it out.

I’m just happy to know that someone else out there has heard of (and liked) Dead Birds. Personally I felt that the biggest flaw in that one was that you couldn’t tell easily that the gravedigger and the preacher were the same person, a minor but important (and non spoilery) plot point.

Edit: my 1000th post is about an indie horror flick. While this is indicative of my tastes in films, I suppose I could’ve done better if I’d noticed first.

7

Kite Runner?

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Awesome! Because, yeah, that was a pretty horrifying movie on certain levels.

-Tom

9

I skipped the 2nd post, as I had an inkling I’d sneak out to the IFC Center and watch it. But… the only showing is at 12:20 AM in NYC. :( That’s a bit past my bedtime these days since the kids will wake me up at 6:30 AM regardless of what time I sack out.

10

that’s unfortunate timing for me too

i’ll have to wait for dvd

11

Fangoria reports this will be out on DVD July 14th.

-Tom
12

Netflix’d!

[If it sucks I blame you.]

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Isn’t Afghanistan’s terrain more inhospitable and culture more suited as a setting for a horror film though (in the sense of being thrown in with the other)? Iraq seems pretty modern from most of the media I’ve seen. That doesn’t mean Iraq can’t be the setting for a horror film, but the writers have a freebie with Afghanistan.

14

Saw this last night. Interesting flick, which definitely delivers on the “special forces ops team confronted by things beyond their ken” level. I don’t think most of the acting was noticeably bad, although every now and then it showed. I actually thought the narrator sounded more like David Duchovny - not when he had actual dialogue so much, but the voiceover sounded very Mulder to me. I find it interesting that the other two screenwriters were Mark A. Patton and Wesley Clark, Jr. (who, according to IMDB.com is in fact the son of Wesley Clark. Is that the general Wesley Clark? They don’t say.).

I’m not as fond of the ending, which I found rather confusing. But then, there are a few other details I don’t seem to have picked up on. For example, when the chief is yelling at the coms officer for “giving the wrong grid” to the helicopter, it’s not clear to me when they would have been in touch with the helicopter. Only a few minutes later, the coms officer reports that he has been consistently unable to raise anything.

15

I watched this yesterday and enjoyed it. I agree with Tom that the lead actor carried the movie. He was calm, soft spoken, and I believed he’d been there before.

The ending did confuse me, I think we’re supposed to be seeing all the people those UFOs turned to dust or something, like they became part of the desert? It would explain the ghostly warriors that other guy spotted in the NVGs earlier.

16

This was on Showtime last week and I remembered the title from this thread and dvr’ed it. I very rarely watch horror movies, mostly because I’m a giant pussy, but I do love a good story with a supernatural premise, so I watched it tonight. It was by no means a great movie; it could have used a better explanation of how the team missed the rendezvous and probably a more coherent ending, but I did enjoy it. It’s a whole lot of setup to get to the reveal and payoff, and I agree with Tom that the Hill of Bones should have been a bigger set piece, but I thought the payoff was definitely worth it and the simplistic special effects added to the tension. I think my biggest problem with the movie was not with the “horror” premise but the missed opportunity with the Spec-Ops Chief and his men. The disconnect between soldiers on the ground and the orders coming from their superiors is a great theme to explore and is completely wasted here. When the chief snaps and attacks Keynes it comes off more as a reaction from his thirst than his frustration with that disconnect.