Tribeca film Festival Review: "The Objective"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 07:00:00 GMT

The horror movie The Objective, which follows a group of American forces soldiers led by a poker-faced CIA man on a mysterious mission into the mountains of Afghanistan, has been greeted as a comeback for its director, Daniel Myrick, who hit paydirt nine years ago as the one of the directors of The Blair Eitch Project. So it's a little surprising and more than a little dispiriting when you begin to notice that the new movie is really very much like Blair Witch minus its found-footage gimmick, which is sorely missed. Once again, we're out in a remote, ominously creepy location that seems all the creepier when the landscape seems to begin to change. And once again, we're stuck out there with a small group of characters who start out overconfident and become more and more unglued as something starts picking them off. Although this movie had a written script (by Myrick, Mark A. Patton, and Wesley Clark, Jr., it even has the same kind of numbingly uninspired and repetitive dialogue, which is made to seem all the flatter by the uninflected non-acting of the principles. (There's also a voice-over narration droned by the CIA guy: "Maybe this is what it takes--getting completely lost first before you can find what you're looking for." The charitable may assume this is meant as a parody of Apocalypse Now.)

Myrick's Blair Witch co-director, Eduardo Sanchez, actually did a much snazzier job of direction on his aliens-among-us horror comedy, Altered, but that movie went straight to DVD, maybe as punishment for its not having a War-on-Terror setting to imbue the proceedings with an air of phony relevance. The Objective does turn out to have a punchline waiting for those who manage to make it through the tedium. It's not wholly coherent, but it seems to suggest that the original expert on al=Qaeda might have been Erich von Daniken. But a punchline with a sprinkling of gore do not a midnight movie classic make.

Biggs News To Me

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:00:00 GMT

As geeks go, I’m more Reform than Orthodox, so I’m guessing the majority of readers who know or care about Luke Skywalker’s doomed pal Biggs Darklighter already know everything there is to know about the long-lost Star Wars scenes I’ve only just rediscovered, but for my fellow slacker nerds and you casual fans out there in blogland who HAVEN'T already experienced the aforementioned scenes a dozen times on bootleg VHS cassettes, first edition laser discs, at George Lucas' house, etcetera...

...okay, so, remember the end of Star Wars (and no, I’m NOT going to call it Episode 4: A New Hope, thank you very much). Remember the rebel in the cheesy moustache who dies (along with Porkins and the rest) while trying to blow up the Death Star? And remember how Luke looks all sad about the dude's demise for a second or two?

Well, as you may remember from the screenplay or the novelization or the Marvel comics adaptation, that guy in the moustache was Biggs, Luke’s older, cooler friend from Tatooine who ran off and joined the Rebel Alliance while Luke was stuck farming moisture for his Uncle. (Hence the cryptic line early in the movie when Luke says, “Oh, Biggs is right, I'm never gonna get out of here."

Now, back in the day, I was more obsessed with Star Wars than all my future obsessions with sex, drugs and rock & roll combined...I knew Yoda was originally supposed to be a little purple elf on Luke’s shoulder, I knew the TIE in TIE fighter meant “Twin-Ion-Engined,” I even suffered through the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special.

But until just a few weeks ago, I'd never heard or even suspected that the following Luke/Biggs scenes had ever left the script stage...and thank God George Lucas left them out. Just as the extra footage in Apocalypse Now Redux showed the thin line between art and crap (goofy hijinx with the Playboy bunnies? The horror! The horror!), I think you’ll agree that the following scenes, while interesting from a completist’s perspective, clearly demonstrate the thin line between “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” and the worst of ‘70s sci-fi cheese.

LUKE'S ORIGINAL INTRO

LUKE & THE ANCHORHEAD GANG

LUKE & BIGGS

The Screengrab : Apocalypse Now Redux

Tribeca film Festival Review: "The Objective"

Biggs News To Me