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.

Vanishing Act: Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Filmmakers disappear for all sorts of reasons. Eccentric geniuses like Kubrick and Malick are known for taking many years between projects and working in complete secrecy. Actors (Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando) and writers (Dalton Trumbo, Stephen King) may dabble with one-and-done efforts and never return to the director’s chair. An Ed Burns may make a big splash with his debut, churn out a series of increasingly lame follow-ups, and eventually find himself releasing his films directly to iTunes.

For this inaugural edition of Vanishing Act, we set the wayback machine for the summer of 1999, when Blair Witch mania swept the nation. Unknown filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez hit upon an ingenious plan for making the most of their microscopic budget, using the mockumentary format to not only justify their jittery digital images but to amp up the "you are there" horror of three amateur filmmakers encountering evil in the woods. The Blair Witch Project was also a pioneer in the realm of viral marketing, using the web to generate underground buzz over whether or not the film was "real." Its influence can be seen in two movies releasing this week: Teeth explicitly mentions Blair Witch in its TV ads, while Cloverfield appropriates both the shakycam immediacy and the viral approach.

When Blair Witch grossed an astonishing $140 million at the box office, it seemed that Myrick and Sanchez were sitting pretty. They had the good sense to steer clear of the stinkeroo sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, except as nominal executive producers. Their next announced collaboration, Heart of Love, was to be a complete change of pace, a screwball comedy described by Myrick in several interviews as "the most politically incorrect movie imaginable." Several web sites (now long defunct) were launched in hopes of recapturing the viral magic of their first collaboration, but the movie’s production was delayed over and over while the directors squabbled with distributor Artisan over Blair Witch profits and the project died quietly.

Despite their tiff with Artisan and mutual antipathy toward the failed Book of Shadows, Myrick and Sanchez toyed with making a Blair Witch prequel before finally going their separate ways. So what have they been up to lately?

This 2005 profile of Sanchez from the Baltimore City Paper finds him in pre-production on Probed, an “alien sci-fi horror monster movie” that was released straight to DVD as Altered in 2006. In a three-skull review (I think that’s a good thing), Fangoria.com notes that the effects-based set pieces are “a far cry from the psychological terrors of Blair Witch,” but that “Sanchez’s work on Altered shares with that previous film a keen sense of downward-spiral pacing.”

Myrick directed The Strand, which originally appeared as a series of webisodes about oddball characters on Venice Beach, CA, and Believers, a straight-to-video thriller about a dangerous cult. In this recent interview, Myrick discusses his new project The Objective, as well as the possibility of working with Sanchez again and maybe even reviving that Blair Witch prequel.

The Screengrab : the objective

Tribeca film Festival Review: "The Objective"

Vanishing Act: Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez