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
Nonureva Really Surprised!
NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!
YouHeart I gave it a 7.5 out of 10
Helloturia I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.
charlesebishopc I was never so grateful for fast forwarding capabilities, so I could miss being inundated with how humans are responsible for climate change. Climate has been changing just fine on its' own for quite a few years. Give me a break.
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.
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.
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.