siderite

I can't say that the movie was bad. The actors were OK, the visuals were OK, the action was OK, the story was ... kind of OK. Nothing was great, though. Milla is still stunning at 50, Dave is still fun, Arly Jover was good as the psychotic religious nut. If you want to see a movie made by the Resident Evil guy, with the Resident Evil gal and with Dave Bautista from Army of the Dead, but that doesn't feature zombies, this is the film for you.

Honestly, I think the problem was that this film could have been a lot better with a slightly tighter story. You have witches, werewolves, atomic monsters, post apocalyptic kingdoms ruthlessly ruled by an Overlord and a powerful Inquisition style Church and you have Milla and Dave. From all of the possible combinations of ideas with these elements, this is NOT the best. That's all I am saying.

Anyway, I watched it, I didn't hate it.

I've read the book and it was fun and light and interesting. The film is none of these. If the book character was emotionally stable and intelligent, Robert Pattinson played it like a mentally challenged person. If the girls in the book were interesting, competent and attractive for very different reasons, in the film they are sexed up junkies. If Mickey's friend was a narcissistic jerk, in the film it was so caricaturesque that he barely felt like a human being. If the exalted leader of the colony was a stuck up bunghole with some hard religious beliefs about printed humans, in the film he's a grotesque parody of Donald Trump. If the aliens in the book were always dangerous and alien, in the film they are fuzzy balls who talk a lot. And so on and so on.

It was all so heavy handed that I couldn't enjoy a thing. The sci-fi parts were minimal, and the human aspects were sketched as by a 10 year old who thinks he's smart. I don't understand what the makers of the movie were trying to achieve. Did they believe that translating something that felt like The Martian or the Bobiverse into a bitter and unsubtle Korean style mock of Christian America was going to be successful? It felt like one of those shows for kids where everybody is psychotic, but somehow little children eat it up.

And it gets worse from here. Some of the parts of the film were unintelligible. The sound was just as poorly treated as the subject of the movie so you couldn't even understand what people were saying. There were no redeeming qualities of any of the shots. Everything was dark and grey and felt cheap.

This film is a mean spirited piece of dung. Why not make your own story if you're going to ignore the original material? I am very disappointed.

Trying to figure out this film is like reading War and Peace and then pretending to understand it. It's surely a well made film, but the main points are atmosphere and set. The story is weird and never explained, the characters are opaque, so all you have to enjoy is the journey.

Now, all actors here did a very good job. The feeling of pervasive darkness, of something outside normal life, the promise of secrets never revealed, all of this is powerful, without delving into mysticism at any time. It's like the fourth season of True Detective had a child with Natural Born Killers. Indeed, it's kind of like the same idea, of people that just are not part of normal society, and what better place to show that than in a small village in Alaska which is named after a mythological hairless dog demon?

The movie is based on a book, but I doubt the book explains a lot more. Having seen the film, which I enjoyed, I feel no need to read the book whatsoever.

Bottom line: a complex and well made allegorical film, hard to give one single meaning to. I never know if all of these stories related to wolves are written by people who understand these animals at all. Not being an expert, I withhold judgement, but from what I've seen, people who believe they are closer to wolves just behave like worse people.