R_Grey

I didn't have high hopes for this movie, but I did hope it knew what it was. To quote Walter Murch: "Film 'X' Would have been a nice little movie, perfectly suitable to its 'environment,' but in the middle of production someone got inflated idea about its possibilities, and, as a result, it became boring and pretentious. It was a chimpanzee film that someone tried to turn into a human-being film, and it came out being neither." That "someone" for this film can be no other than Joe Carnahan, who wrote, directed and produced this wreck. He is a competent technician and seems to be able to work with actors, but what he doesn't have a feel for is pacing and the higher language that makes film a unique art form.

Mundane exposition and chit-chats are shot in close-ups, life-altering decisions in mid-shots; landscape of Alaska is beautiful and has a presence with a wonderful sound design and art direction, but it's a fantasy world that tries to have realistic characters. The backstories are covered through uncreative flashbacks with poems and ambiguous phrases without enough for the audience to grab onto.

The big problem however is with the wolves, who are written to be both the metaphors for inner demons and the real-life predators. Joe doesn't seem to know when to employ which and therefore the wolves end up being overused. Without purpose, they blend into the background instead of developing into plausible threats that we can be afraid of psychologically or physically.

In the end, this could have been a great Robocop-type film with plot driving it forward while comic-book characters alluded to their human nature but who were never distracted from the action. But in addition to that, it tried to be The Tree of Life and The Exorcist and succeeding in nothing.

to say this movie is bad is an understatement. Guardian represents everything that's possible to be wrong with a movie, that's also its sole redeeming quality. The reason I gave this movie it's single star (aside from the fact that there is no option to put 0 stars) is because it has certain educational purpose. Robert Altman, when asked which movies influenced him the most, said: "the movies I hated the most," he'd see a film and think "I'll never make a movie like that." That's the case with Guardian. Watching it makes you understand how and why a movie can be bad (or oh-my-god-it-burns-my-eye bad in this instance). There is not single aspect I can start you off with, it's bad globally: every line is a cliché stolen from Buffy, Blade, or some other B vampire movie (and the ending is a word-for-word rip off from the first Blade -- I can't spoil the movie with this, it hits the bottom on the first line); the image is terrible, either they used magnifying glass for a lens or rented a wrong camcorder, because this is not shot on film with an HDCAM, not even on HDV or DVX from the looks of it; the cinematography is ...well, I don't think they thought about lighting; the set pieces and the makeup is admirably expensive for such a low budget, but the actors wearing the suits couldn't act their way out of a noose on the day of their sentence.

At first I actually thought I was watching a rerun of a Buffy episode, but then I realized that even Buffy wasn't that bad (and there weren't any commercials!). I watched further and I couldn't believe it was on a premium channel, on cable! But seeing this piece of s$@t make it this far, I now know that any film can find distribution...