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Good story, Not enough for a whole film

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

I was never so grateful for fast forwarding capabilities, so I could miss being inundated with how humans are responsible for climate change. Climate has been changing just fine on its' own for quite a few years. Give me a break.

From the DVD cover I was expecting a B-level horror-film-in-the-snow, style "30 Days of Night". This is not a horror film, which may explain why it has disappointed some reviewers here.This film is in fact more of a supernatural, environmental ghost story, combining an environmental theme to fantasy story-telling and form. In a nutshell, search and exploitation of natural resources cause damage to the environment, expose the characters to hidden, subterranean forces.The story is intriguing and original: an environmental theme, powerful and mysterious forces as in "The Mist" unleashed against the camp base standing for our consumer/industrial civilization. Similarily to "Monsters", we barely see these forces but thanks to an incredible sound design, they seem to be everywhere and appear from nowhere.The direction is strong from the beginning to the end and sometimes quite risk-taking. The Last Winter could maybe have gained more by departing from the classic Hollywood model, further in the direction it takes. Still this film is overall a very good surprise and I believe there is no other film like it. Highly recommended.

You may choose to see this simply as The Thing recast into contemporary eco-anxiety; the monster rising up from ancient ice as the land itself, perceived from the human point-of-view as a supernatural emanation. Or wholly disregard as such for the unimaginative rendition. Plot and acting, the stuff most viewers immediately take notice of, are largely mediocre.But there is more, I think. What I saw, takes its cues from The Shining instead; so, the drilling compound secluded in glacial wilderness as the mind-screen – a key trope in the haunted house film, where old rooms creaking with secrets map to rooms of the mind – where, once locked inside, paranoid visions project. Outside and inside become one, each the other's projection, so that the very point-of-view is challenged. Now seeing and what is seen are inextricably bound, so that efforts to render the supernatural vision objective threaten to destroy perception.Oh, but it's captured on camcorder footage, a huge blunder. There is more of this. So much, to the extent that I wonder; is this the work of a promising filmmaker in control of his images, or merely the rehash of a filmmaker keen to rework a bunch of stuff he likes, now and then tapping by accident into an intriguing motif? So the white box in the middle of nowhere – where the earlier drilling expedition tapped into cosmic veins – should we regard it as that axis mundi from where the energies flow and which shatters human consciousness that approaches unprepared - a man returns mad from it - or are we stretching to interpret? Hard to tell.Story-wise, it's all a bit helter skelter. Relationship stuff – past and present – as meant to ground the whole thing in human drama, but the friction they provide is flat. And a bunch of theories thrown around to explain the phenomena. Eventually a plane crashes in the compound, and the leaders set out on foot for the rescue.Once out there in the wilderness, we're treated to the revelation. Here, I think, is where a lot of viewers will be put off – and have. At the sight of the supernatural. But take a look at the scene again where the spirit makes his appearance by the campfire; the vision unfolds by, ghostly spectrum, almost in slow-motion, and one of the characters is completely oblivious while the other screams for him to see and open his eyes.It doesn't help that the first has been an obnoxious, boorish presence for the entire film – and I think this is the notion the filmmaker expects us to entertain, that the materialist person is blind to the manifestations of the hidden energies of the cosmos, we have, after all, first seen the spectrum in camcorder footage that should render its existence objective - but still; was there anything to open the eyes to in the first place except for what the mind conjured? So, the part of this that resembles The Thing, with a bunch of people growing paranoid together in close quarters; ordinary stuff. But the part that visualizes mind narrative, even in this wonky, semi-conscious way, makes me glad I rented.It's all tied up to seeing – and failing to. The dead bodies of those subsumed by the otherworldly encounter have their eyes removed by crows. This is good stuff, and it would be a strange coincidence if the motif was randomly chosen.There are is some aerial photography of Alaska that is pretty good, bird's eye views – the crows again – snowblind. The final image is also from a bird's eye level, except tilted down so we don't see. The apocalypse – meaning in Greek a revelation – has now been transferred to the world at large; except we're not privy.I'd like to see the filmmaker disentangle himself from cinematic knowledge alone – 'how would Kubrick shoot this?' – and plumb, ground deeper; study, for example, Japanese woodblock printing from the 19th century to see how masters at work guided vision; how the bird's eye can offer glimpses of a fleeting, floating world. Even better, to meditate on what it means to see from a bird's eye.

If you've ever wondered what the cast members of TV's "Friday Night Lights" were up to before they hit pay dirt with that wonderful series, check out "The Last Winter," where you can see no fewer than two of them - Connie Britton and Zach Gilford - fighting forces of evil together in a single film. Here they play employees of an energy firm that has sent a small team, headed by Ron Perlman, to the Arctic Circle to pump out the oil that lies beneath the newly-melting permafrost. James LeGros is a cocky environmentalist who keeps trying to convince everyone that something "not quite right" is happening to the climate in the area, but none of the "drill, baby, drill" types seem to want to listen. Yet, soon a mad-as-hell Mother Nature is taking matters into her own hands and, before you know it, rain is falling in February, the ice is breaking under the workers' feet, the equipment is malfunctioning, crows are circling the premises, planes are dropping out of the sky, people's noses are bleeding for no apparent reason, one man has wandered off into the wilderness stark naked, a mysterious creature is lurking around the base, and a strange form of madness has begun to settle in over the employees.There's really not a whole lot to say about "The Last Winter" - which has been directed, edited and co-written by Larry Fessenden - except that this cautionary-tale about the dangers of global warming is long on exposition and short on credibility and suspense. And, oh yes, the climax is really, really cheesy.It's nice to see Britton and Gilford outside the confines of Dylan, Texas for a change, but this low-grade mishmash of climate-change speculation and Inuit folklore - think of it as "The Thing" meets "An Inconvenient Truth" - has precious little else to recommend it.