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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 257650" data-attributes="member: 23">Well... I watched it last night...Rogue (2007) <img src="https://occ-0-300-299.1.nflxso.net/art/67144/63b98744f7ad8cb4dc2ff346886e01e77e467144.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 843px" /> In which A Place To Call Home's Prudence Swanson is married to the bloke that lived next door to Elena, Duchess Of Branagh in Bed Of Roses. As I said, I did wade into this one with low expectations. And it turned out to be thoroughly enjoyable. Far more than it has a right to be. I'm so glad I watched this after the dire Freshwater. Despite the poster and the action-heavy trailer, I was pleasantly surprised that the film really took its time and racked up the tension and the stakes. The first act in particular was great with the stunning Northern Territory scenery beautifully shot. The flare as the first real sign of danger seemed to break all the rules. Not only was it barely discernible in the bright daylight, it's very unusual in film to see the flare this way. Normally in film we see them being fired in the height of drama, so it was unsettling to see it through the prism of calm, luring the unsuspecting characters in. Some characters may serve traditional roles of the genre, but most of them are played by really good actors and feel very grounded and real, which serves the film well as the more OTT moments come from a place of reality. Timid Allen's moment of Hulking-out could have been ridiculous if not performed by seasoned actor Geoff Morrell. Likewise, his wife Elizabeth's frailty due to being newly recovered from a life-threatening illness (cancer, it's heavily implied) could have been viewed as unnecessary and even tasteless if she wasn't played by an actress of Heather Mitchell's ilk. Having only been aware of Heather as glamorous snobs in period dramas (APTCH and Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries), she was a revelation here, in a contemporary setting, sans makeup and with cropped hair. Dare I say it's up there with the best of her scenes on APTCH? While Jaws  is the benchmark for such creature features, I couldn't expect any such film to live up to that and I've long since stopped actively looking for similarities. All the same, it was impossible not to notice that the creators of Rogue know their source material. A lot of what worked about Jaws is present here: the focus is on suspense over graphic horror (any SFX are used to work with the realism and deepen the atmosphere, rather than showboating to show what they can do); the creature in question stays mostly concealed until the final reel (in the first eighty minutes, the croc has around thirty seconds of screen-time, the first of which are just glimpses of scales disappearing underwater) its threat being represented at times by floating devices; characters become more isolated as the film progresses until it comes down to one man trapped in the creature's habitat and forced to go mano a mano with it under impossible conditions (where Jaws had under five minutes of Brody alone, Rogue has closer to twenty minutes. The intensity and claustrophobic entrapment are a delight). Where Rogue perhaps fell down was in making its "final man" too obvious from the beginning. Much of Jaws was seen through the eyes of Brody, but Spielberg and Scheider were careful to make him as ineffectual as possible to surprise the audience. Rogue had a token scene in which its man of the hour and a half wore spectacles and someone called him "four eyes". But he had alpha male written all over him. While the hand to teeth combat in the face of the creature's big reveal were terrific, the outcome of the battle felt predictable to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the genre. The inevitability made it feel equal parts satisfying and disappointing. It's also a cliché that the hero in question was American, and conjures up images of ego massaging contract negotiations in which the Hollywood actor agrees to do the film as long as he gets to save the Aussies. Nonetheless, it worked well and the culture clash was referenced several times with Americans referred to with some disdain. That theme is established in McKell's introductory scene in which he is in a rugged outback bar loudly complaining to someone at the end of a phone about the terrible service. He's actually referring to the mobile phone reception, but the barman doesn't stop to ask questions. He simply plucks a fat dead fly from the bar and pops it into a cappuccino, which he then serves along with a warm avuncular smile to the unsuspecting McKell. As for the creature itself, I was very impressed indeed. I imagine it's a combination of animatronic and CG, but I couldn't tell you where one ended and the other began (even though I've just watched a featurette on the creation of the animatronic croc). It's a great film and will definitely stand up to repeated views. I can see myself watching this one every few years from now on. For me, I think Black Water probably remains the best of the crocodilia attack films, but with Rogue - even though it's a little more glossy and sanitised - comes another film that has an atmosphere of tension and an eye for detail that most films of this genre lack.  Perhaps in the longer term it will even end up my favourite. [MEDIA=youtube]Ur7CpX16xXE[/MEDIA] </blockquote>

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