Seraphim Falls (2007)

I really enjoyed watching Seraphim Falls. If you enjoyed First Blood starring Sylvester Stallone and are a fan of cowboy type films, this movie might be one you'll love! Great plot, action, direction and cinemotography made this a fine film. I feel it's nit given the attention it deserves!

I can never understand why a movie producer or director will go to all the trouble and spend millions of dollars and end up with a film with so many obvious errors. These always show up in the "Goofs" section. Some are pretty obvious while others can be subtle. I see this as laziness on their part and an insult to the viewing public. I have ridden horses all my life and when you are out in the middle of nowhere and dismount, the last thing you do is let loose of the horse and let them wander off. REALLY! How stupid! Gee, it's only thirty eight miles back to the farm, I don't have any water or food so I think I'll just turn O'l Buck loose. How unrealistic. When the Chinese railroad crew set down the two rails on the ties and just started whacking them with their hammers, (no railroad spikes involved) I really had to laugh. Think how many people watched that scene and thought how stupid it was? You don't have to be a railroad expert to see the problem. For all the money these directors get paid, you would think they could have someone around who would clue them in.

In 1868, Liam Neeson and his shrinking band of hired help tracks the lone Pierce Brosnan through the mountain wilderness and then down into the valley where each must pass through various Western iconic communities: the trapper's cabin up in the mountains, the wagons of the religious settlers, the mining camp with its likker-drinking Irish, and the lone miracle-cure peddler on her cart.You don't learn until more than half-way through exactly WHY Neeson is pursuing Brosnan. It was at the end of the Civil War. Due to accident and misunderstanding, Captain Brosnan's men burned down the barn and the house of peaceful farmer Liam Neeson. Neeson's lovely wife, their child, and their little baby were in the house. Neeson's thirst for revenge is unslakable.It's COLD up in those mountains. Everyone is bundled up in great big bearskin coats. Brosnan is wounded in the shoulder and there is a painful scene in which he screams while extracting the ball and cauterizing the wound. The script is perceptive enough to have him treat the arm tenderly for the rest of the movie.Brosnan loses his bearskin coat when he falls in a river, goes over what looks like Victoria Falls, and manages to swim away. This guy is clearly on a first name basis with suffering.The framework for this story was provided by some previous exercises in survival in the wilderness against great odds. "First Blood: Rambo" and "The Outlaw Josey Wales" are chief among them, but some shots try to duplicate "Lawrence of Arabia". There's even a notion ripped off from Liam Neeson's own "Rob Roy," in which Brosnan hides inside a hollowed-out dead animal.It's designed as a fairy tale, I think. It's hard to tell whether the writers and director expect us to believe that Brosnan could survive under those conditions, or that Angelica Huston could appear out of nowhere with a horse and wagon in the middle of a parched desert, and then be on her merry way. Or -- how can Brosnan climb thirty feet into a tree and then drop a big knife directly onto the skull of a pursuer, knowing where the pursuer will stand, and that the knife will (hold on) PIERCE THE SKULL as easily as a hypodermic syringe penetrates the skin? In the end, the two men have battled and bloodied each other to exhaustion and both have lost the ability to kill, so they stagger off on this dry plain, each going his separate direction, before both figures dissolve into nothingness.If there is a covert message, and the film seems to creak at the joints trying to impart one, it must go something like: "Let bygones be bygones," or "Peace is better than war," or "Cut the crap." Not much acting is required, though it's always nice to see familiar faces on the screen, even if they wind up looking like homeless urban campers. The way Brosnan's beard comes out, it can't help making him into a comic figure. He could be in a Charlie Chaplin movie. And I like Liam Neeson, but I like him much better as a nice guy than as a grim reaper. His nose begins in the middle of his forehead. I certainly hope it has nothing to do with the fact that Neeson was born in Northern Ireland and Brosnan in the Republic.Neeson even gets to come up with a famous quotation: "Only the dead have seen the end of war." It's usually been attributed to Plato, and that sounds right but it's evidently untrue. It appears to have come from Santayana's "Soliloquoys" written after World War I : "Yet the poor fellows think they are safe! They think that the war is over! Only the dead have seen the end of war." Santayana does not attribute the saying to Plato, or anybody else. I'm just throwing this trifle in. I had to Google it myself.

Heh, easy way to write a review...Seriously, after I read this (fellow's?) review I honestly don't think that I could say it any better. As a matter of fact, I bloody well KNOW that I couldn't! : ) The only other thing that I want to add is that this is an EXTREMELY Existentialist film (well, technically until the odd couple of encounters toward the end which will likely turn off the Western 'Realists' that ol' IQ is talking about) As he also said, this is not your usual by the numbers, Good Guys / Bad Guys kind of film. In one way it is REALLY stripped down to very RAW, primitive elements; but, on the other hand there is a very low-key, sort of subtle underlying almost metaphysical feel to it, ESPECIALLY at the end.So, as IQ said about 'Misdirected'; I wouldn't really quite use that word, since I do not feel that the film itself is misdirected, but I would say that people who go to watch this movie can VERY easily and mistakenly be misdirected into thinking or erroneously jumping to the conclusion that it is overly simple and / or boring with nothing much to it.So, in a unique way it is sort of a 'Thinking Man's' Western, but only in a deep down, almost vague kind of way. If you think that you are all intellectual and whatnot, you might easily watch this for a few minutes and think 'I don't see what the big deal is'. But, as the reviewer at DVD Verdict said, once it was over and he gave himself time to digest it, even though ON THE SURFACE it looks really simple, he began to appreciate some of the underlying things about it. So, DON'T expect a bunch of 'Clever' dialog or anything like 'THE USUAL SUSPECTS' or anything remotely like that. The 'Thinking' part isn't based upon any obvious 'Cleverness', but more in a 'Pondering' kind of way well after you have finished watching the movie.Heh, truly a hard one to put across to others as to whether they would want to watch it or not, but like IQ stated far more eloquently than I could, if you consider what kind of Western it is that you enjoy, you should be able to make a decent guess as to whether you would like this film...