All The Same
posted on Monday, March 24, 2008 in Movie Reviews
Director Daniel Mynick is probably best known for being one of the brains behind The Blair Witch Project. That film hasn’t really stood the test of time, but at the very least, people remember it for being original. His latest film, however, doesn’t seem to feature any yearning to break out of the box, employing the same tricks that we’ve been seeing in horror movies for the last ten years. Solstice is just another run-of-the-mill supernatural thriller. Megan’s twin sister, Sofie, committed suicide a few months back. Megan is distraught, but decides to go on an annual trip with her friends to an old family home in the bayous of Louisiana. The trip happens on the Solstice, the time of year when the sun is closest to the Earth, and the land of the dead is closest to the land of the living. Megan begins to feel something sinister in the air, a supernatural force that is trying to reach out to her. As she looks into these strange occurrences, she uncovers a secret that changes everything she knew about her sisters, her friends, and herself.
We’ve been here before: teenagers out in a house in the middle of nowhere being terrorized by ghosts. The main problem of Solstice is that it lacks the ability to surprise anyone. We’ve gone through these tropes over and over again, and by now, people are able to call out the beats of the film. By the middle of the film, the audience will probably have figured out what’s really going on, and when that time comes, the film viewing experience just comes apart at the seams. The script is just lazy, and most of the characters don’t have any purpose in the film. They could’ve replaced a couple of Megan’s friends with a dog and we probably wouldn’t have noticed.
The film does look good, though. The production values are pretty high, and the cinematography makes full use of the unique surroundings. Otherwise, the direction is rather weak. The film telegraphs every scare with a heavy dose of scary music, and it really cuts down on the shock factor. It also falls back on lame flashbacks that really don’t as well into the film as they ought to, and it hurts the flow of the story, drawing attention away from the events of the present.
The cast doesn’t do much to help. It feels like they’re just reading their lines, never really committing to what their roles call for. Elisabeth Harnois is a decent enough heroine, but she isn’t able to make her character seem competent. Tyler Hoeclin doesn’t even try to sound or seem Cajun in any way, which is really bad, since that’s the first thing his character lets us know. The rest of the cast kind of just fills out the scenes, fading slowly into the background.
Solstice might have been a decent enough film a decade ago, but we ought to be done with this by now. At this point, they’re just rehashing every plot, every character, every twist, and every line from horror films past. While Solstice scores points for at least looking good, you have to stop and ask, “what’s the point?”
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