Die letzte Grenze

Looking at the cover of my DVD I expected this movie to be a cheap Mad Max rip-off, I was partly right. It was similar in a lot of ways, but in lot a bit different.

I did get the cheap part right though. If IMDb trivia is to be believed than this movie lost a lot of its budget and it was quite evident in the quality of the movie. The movie had potential, it just needed that backing to help it reach it.

One man's search for revenge in a post-apocalyptic wasteland? Couldn't they have come with something at least a bit original? The italians did it a million times over in the eighties, but apparently none of them reached the far north, so the finns apparently had to make one for themselves.

And I really wish they didn't. The film is clunky, and the finnish laconic way of expression doesn't really do it any favors. The scenery is dull, but the ends of Europe found in the north should be used to emphasize the bleakness of life in the post-apocalyptic world instead of just being a simple backdrop. In many moments I found myself forgetting the very setting of the movie, as it felt none different from what it really is in pre-apocalyptic Lapland, with all the local alcoholics with inadequately pronounced English.

The good thing is that this film is not "broken", as in it does have a structure and various levels of acting. The bad thing is... everything else, really. This film has no feel to eat, it doesn't look any good, and engages the viewer only in doing something else than watching this film best left in the bargain bin one can expect to find it.

I'm not a great fan of post-Apocalypse movies, but this was a seriously bad film in every way. The big bang didn't seem to have destroyed all the vegetation, because between barren stretches of rocky landscape in the 'northern tundra' there were some nice green lush areas where the good guys - and the good gal - could wander in their Dr Who reject costumes. Fanny Bastian as Doaiva spent most of the film in old bits of animal fur and rags, but when she was getting together with the hero, Jake, played with an astounding lack of range by Jolyon Baker, a pretty dress materialised from thin air and she pranced around in that for one brief scene. Jurgen Prochnow played Duke, a somewhat elderly leader of a much-feared - or so we were told - biker gang. All they did was ride around doing a kind of 'scare the old ladies and show how tough we are' impersonation but still, they were apparently the scourge of the surviving world. The music was loud and intrusive. Duke wore an eagle's head on top of a kind of improvised Viking helmet and an old lady kept telling Duke he was going to end up dead, which wasn't exactly difficult to foresee from the first minute he appeared. The 'twist' at the end was obvious from the start, and if I'd filmed it in my back garden using neighbours for actors, I'd still have thought I'd made a bad job of it. Very disappointing.

The last Border is directed by Mika Kaurismaki, who is the brother of Aki Kaurismaki, the film features Matti Pellonpää a regular actor in their films, he plays the band manager in leningrad cowboys go to america. The last border is not too bad, has some funny tongue in cheek dialogue, also i like the soundtrack which is mainly heavy metal style riffs and beats, which pop up out of nowhere.

'The last border' may not be good science fiction. It reminds me of Mad Max, although the plot is different for sure. Not everything is completely logical, but I must bring up a few points. The movie was filmed somewhere in northern Scandinavia, and obviously they didn't do much to change the way the vegetation looks like. To be a post-apocalypse world, it looks slightly too "normal". On the other hand, if there was no vegetation, there would be no people either. So I would say the landscape does indeed look as realistic as it can. I just wonder what the people eat, as most of the reindeer seem to be gone.

On the previous comment there was a question raised about clothing. The pretty dress seen in the movie is a traditional Lappish costume - the kind of dress you might very well find from those regions, even after an environmental disaster. So most of the things match, although obviously this movie was made when people still believed the oil is going to last forever. So eager are the biker boys to waste fuel driving around with no purpose.

Anyway, the movie itself is slightly boring. The idea of a solitaire man seeking for revenge has been used many times. I would say that Kaurismäki intentionally recycles some of the basic ideas of classic westerns. On the other hand, there are clearly characters and scenes that seem to be very similar to those in Mad Max. (Althogh I can't make a difference between the three.) It is not a bad idea. The only problem is, there is not enough to happen. Most of the characters just hang around pointlessly. Some of them do have potential, but nothing really comes out of it. Kari Väänänen at least is really enjoying himself, and Matti Pellonpää has a few funny lines.

What I really like about this movie is the image it gives of an ultimate macho culture. The biker boys look childish and ridiculous, like a bunch of school kids playing war on the backyard. They don't look tough but just stupid, just like real-life low-forehead -type of crooks.

It is a bad movie in a way, but on the other hand... I somehow like it more than average science fiction. Maybe it is just because the landscapes are familiar.