By Robert Scucci
| Published
I’m just going to come out swinging and say that I’m not really a fan of cautionary environmental tales that spend more time preaching than entertaining. At this point, most informed people understand that we’re causing irreversible damage to our planet, and most uninformed people are so set in their ways they’re not going to improve them.
While I’m known to joke excessively about throwing my used car batteries into the ocean where they belong, I don’t actually do that, but I can’t resist my parents’ uncomfortable laughs whenever I visit and say things like that in casual conversation. And while I had my reservations about checking out 2006’s The Last Winter for the above reasons, the 76 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes and the presence of Ron Perlman were enough to get me to buy in.
I’m glad I tuned into The Last Winter because, while the environmental messaging is pretty boilerplate and overdone, there’s almost a cosmic level of horror lurking just beneath the surface. My main recurring thought was that this movie really reminded me of The Thing, while entirely carving out its own identity.
The remote, snowy wilderness, isolation, paranoia, and fading sense of an already strained team at the end of their rope, in my mind, make this a perfect spiritual successor to John Carpenter’s The Thing. Watching both films back to back would make for a great double feature that will leave you absolutely wrecked by the time you finish, if I had to weigh in.
Starts In A Bad Place, And Gets So Much Worse
The Last Winter takes place at a remote Alaskan drilling station, where the K.I.K. Corporation is preparing to explore the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil. Running the operation is Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman), who clashes with environmental scientist James Hoffman (James LeGros) over whether the unusually warm conditions have made the project too dangerous to continue. Abby Sellers (Connie Britton) is caught somewhere in the middle, having previously worked with and been an item with Hoffman before becoming romantically involved with Pollack, because being trapped at the end of the world apparently wasn’t uncomfortable enough for the already worn-out team.
Things get considerably worse when rookie worker Maxwell McKinder (Zach Gilford) wanders off into the snow and returns claiming that he saw something out there after his equipment suspiciously reports that he wandered over 300 miles through the unforgiving outside conditions.
He later grabs a video camera and heads outside alone in the middle of the night to document a herd of spectral caribou, because that’s the smartest thing a man could do in this situation, but it’s reasonable to believe that his decisions are being influenced for the worse by some sort of unknown, cosmic force beyond the scope of human comprehension. Maxwell turns up dead the following morning, complete with eyes gouged out, prompting Hoffman to suspect that gases released from the thawing permafrost could be causing hallucinations and erratic behavior among the crew.
With communication becoming unreliable and the weather refusing to cooperate for climate change reasons, getting everybody out of the station becomes increasingly difficult. Hoffman and Pollack are already at each other’s throats over what’s actually happening, and the mounting body count doesn’t exactly improve morale. Whether they’re dealing with toxic gas, collective insanity, or some ancient, incomprehensible force that really doesn’t appreciate having its backyard drilled for oil becomes the larger question as their isolated little operation completely falls apart.
Everybody Acts Reliably Like They Should Here
Ron Perlman is the true MVP in The Last Winter because he sells Pollack’s hardened demeanor with so much grit that you know it comes from a place where he has to think and act the way he does. He wants to stick to protocol no matter how dangerous things get, and though he never explicitly explains why he’s such an immovable object, it’s clear that he simply wants to do things by the book, no matter how increasingly misguided that kind of logic becomes as it works against him and his crew while matters continue to escalate.
At the station, everybody drinks like the world is ending, and in this case, I don’t think anybody should stop them. It’s cold, miserable, people are dying left and right, and there’s no way out. Sure, taking large, oblivion-seeking swigs from a flask is probably the worst thing you could do to ward off hypothermia, but if you’re going to die anyway, you might as well synthesize the feeling of warmth with whatever means you have at your disposal.
The Last Winter is absolutely brutal, and everybody sells how dire the situation is without overacting or exaggerating the gravity of it. The only failing, if you could call it that for a film that came out in 2006, is that the CGI, when used to show the source of the terror, is lacking. However, it’s the only thing that breaks the immersion, and it’s not like this is what dominates the cinematography. Just squint, and you’ll be right back to where you need to be.
If you’re a fan of the nameless dread that boils just under the surface of John Carpenter’s The Thing, you’ll feel right at home streaming The Last Winter, which is currently available to watch for free on Tubi as of this writing.
