Last Sentinel

Firstly the earth has had no glacial, mountaintop or polar ice whatsoever, none, for 90% of its history. Including the geologically incredibly recent conditions before the current ice age. Secondly if all the ice and snow in the world melted, every ounce of it, se levels would go up less than 70 meters. 90% of the current dry and arable landmass of earth would still be here. Nothing can make just "two continents" except for continental drift creating amalgamations and super continents, and that will be over tens of millions of years, and there would be roughly the same dry land and sea covered ratio.

I just mention that because a couple of the people involved in the making of this have bizarrely claimed the set up of two small remaining patches of dry land is a "warning" due to climate change, when that is absurd.

The general human premise, of an distant rare and isolated military or colonial outpost or outposts, though would be a better premise and has served a lot of good literature. Greek poet Constantine Cavafy long form poem served as inspiration for the novel "Tartar Steppe" and the recent "Waiting for the Barbarians" with Johnny Depp, Mark Rylance and Robert Pattinson.

Those are good treatments of this idea. This dumbed down "Last Sentinel" is just mind numbingly bad. The plot twists become tedious, and in fact are so telegraphed as to be cringe. No one in the film can act. And you will be checking your watch every five minutes as more and more boring and pointless filler plods by.

3/10.

It's the year 2063. Most land has been flooded by the rising sea level and only two smaller continents remain which are constantly at war. A group of soldiers is on a two year tour stationed on a rusting platform in the middle of the ocean. They have been waiting for their replacements for months. An abandoned ship suddenly drifts into their vicinity out of the blue.

The inspiration for this must be those WWII anti-aircraft platforms off the Britain coast. That's a good start although I would be more excited if they shot a few scenes on location. The premise intrigued me for a half hour or so. I stayed with the movie for another hour. It starts losing steam over the second hour and really loses me towards the end. The plot really can't support a two hour runtime.

Although the few actors and locations are very good for what seems a low budget movie, the pacing and tension works very well at the start, and the developments are smooth enough to carry the film for a while... the movie lasts two hours for a plot that is not particularly worth the wait, considering it doesn't stick the landing with its disappointing ending. The best compliment I can give it : it's not particularly bad or annoying at any point (see Interceptor for comparison purposes). But there's a lack of cohesion, specially with the message (if there even is one).. a lack of action, emotion, satisfaction or anything to hang on to.

The title says it all. This movie drags on from one unclear moment to the next. After spending nearly two hours with it, I think it could have made an interesting short, not a feature length movie. To its credit and the actors' credit, they were fully realized and animated people. Very good character development and done very early in the film. But to what purpose? There are movies that leave open questions that one can think about and were created to good effect. In this movie, it leaves too many open questions that one can't resolve. In the end, I didn't care about the characters, I didn't care what they did or why they did it. The movie left me completely flat and disappointed I spent money and time to see it.

According to this post-apocalyptic film, most of the world will be submerged by the year 2063. There are only two continents left, and they are at war. It makes no difference to the film, though, because we don't see any of it.

Smack bang in the middle of the two remaining continents is a military outlook, or sentinel, and is occupied by four soldiers. There's Cassidy (Kate Bosworth), Sullivan (Lucien Laviscount), Baines (Martin McCann), and Hendrichs (Thomas Kretschmann). Cassidy and Sullivan are romantically involved, and Hendrichs is a Sergeant with an attitude, while Baines is the guy who makes sure everything functions.

With food supplies running low, no communication from the outside world, and the base starting to tilt, they will have no option than to evacuate shortly. One day, a mysterious ship - thought to be the relief - appears, but there is no sign of life. This very ship would become the cause of rising tension between the soldiers, tearing them apart.

The film is entirely set on the sentinel, with only four characters. The 116 minute runtime did feel a bit too long. There are a few twists towards the end. In general this wasn't a bad watch and the character development was interesting, but I'm just not sure I'm going to remember this over time - especially with its ending...

Interestingly, cassettes were reintroduced again this year (2023), and according to the film cassettes will still be around in 2063, as the characters are shown listening to cassettes and not digital media. This remains to be seen, I guess...