An average movie

This is another movie that I had been chasing for so many years. Well, I wish I could say it had been worth waiting for so long but, unfortunately, the damned thing turned out to be quite terrible, even borderline unwatchable. Of course, since this movie had a really bad reputation, I can’t say I was really surprised though. Basically, imagine if Lovecraft was born 100 years later and wrote some horror story with some Nazis, add up a really esoteric soundtrack by Tangerine Dream and, surprisingly, it might actually seem appealing. However, Michael Mann had apparently no clue what the hell he was doing and it seems that he had actually regressed as a director after ‘Thief’ which had been a really promising directorial debut. Of course, you could argue that the movie had been butchered by the studio as the original cut of the film ran more than three hours but my guess was that this original cut was already a terrible mess. However, by cutting so much, the whole thing became almost incomprehensible. Indeed, as a result, even though Scott Glenn was given top-billing, he showed up only half way through and it is obvious that many scenes explaining slightly more his mysterious character were now missing. For example, it was rather bewildering to see Glaeken jumping into bed with Eva Cuza 10 secondes after he just met her. There was also the issue that, even though they did hire Wally Veevers, a legend in special effects who also worked on ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, the guy died 2 weeks into post-production so they had to finish up all the special effects without him and the end-result looked just terrible. Eventually, you might wonder if making a fantasy feature taking place during WWII was maybe not misguided but, 20 years later, Guillermo Del Toro did manage to pull it off fairly nicely with ‘El laberinto del fauno‘. Anyway, to conclude, even if I’m glad I finally watched the damned thing, it was still terribly weak and it is not worth a look, even if you are a die-hard fan of Michael Mann’s work.      

By the way, if you still want to check it out, you can use the following links here underneath: 

Part 1: www.dailymotion.com/video/x6ezx2h

Part 2: www.dailymotion.com/video/x6ezxvs