Review: LAST SENTINEL – What’s The Point Of It All?
Have you ever watched a film and thought to yourself, ‘what’s the point of this?’. That’s what was going through my mind as I watched Last Sentinel. It’s competently made and well enough acted – but it has no energy. It’s inert, it just sits there. I couldn’t believe that someone wrote it and then someone decided to spend money making it. It has nothing new to say and it’s not even fun in an exploitative way. It just…exists. The fact that Last Sentinel has 21 producers probably says more about how the film came to be than anything that I could try and speculate about.
Set sometime in the near future, Last Sentinel follows a small team of multi-national soldiers (Kate Bosworth, Lucien Laviscount, Martin McCann and Thomas Kretschmann) stationed on a remote ocean outpost. Their relief team is long overdue, supplies are running low and tensions are frayed. When an empty ship approaches, some of the team see the opportunity to escape – and that’s when the tension really amps up.
Who am I kidding – this film is still as boring as a dog’s ass!
The above set-up seems pretty intriguing right? It has the potential for tension, excitement, thrills. The resulting film has none of that. Characters bicker and fall out. They team up and disband. They sense they’re being double-crossed. Maybe they are, maybe they’re not. You won’t care by the time the film gets to its twist ending – which isn’t really a twist because the central mystery isn’t particularly well positioned. John Carpenter’s The Thing is the gold standard for this type of one location paranoia thriller, but sadly this Tanel Toom directed/Malachi Smyth written feature can’t even manage a bronze medal.
If it sounds like I’m being harsh on Last Sentinel – it’s because I am. This film has potential. The opening storm sequence is well realised with decent visual effects. The performances are solid and the sets are good. Last Sentinel would have been good – if something actually interested occurred. The running time of Last Sentinel clocks-in at almost two hours, but it seems at least an hour longer than that – you could have cut thirty minutes and it still would have plodded along. The whole endeavour is a massive waste of time – the filmmakers, mine and yours.
In a world filled with a never-ending stream of films and TV shows, you should do yourself a favour and decide to watch something (anything) other than Last Sentinel.
