Alex Keipper (caffeinatedalex)

My favorite John Carpenter movie... terrifying, tense, suspenseful, and the ending is fucking great. This movie was crafted with incredible care for all effects and visuals. The snowy wasteland comes off as harsh and lonely, in the worst ways, and I think that's what Carpenter would want. Kurt Russel is really at the top of his game, and watching the scientists play off of each other only increases the suspense and horror. This movie is a classic.

This Halloween, I ended up settling for an odd lineup of movies to get me in the holiday season. I hadn't viewed David Fincher's crime classic in a few years, and decided that the tone fit the bill for a good Halloween movie. The story settles us in AnyCity, U.S.A., modern times, an appropriately vague setting that brings us into the movie, but leaves us puzzled and intrigued by the ambiguity. It also aids to the whole sense that this place is the fucking pits and we don't blame Somerset for wanting to get out. Oh yeah, Somerset; Morgan Freeman. He's training Mills, Brad Pitt, as his replacement, before they both get swept up in this whole mess. Se7en really gets you in a lot of ways, the first of which is its smoothness. It slips in all of these setups like that really good looking guy at the bar who studies The Game for the art of the pickup artist and manages to bang everyone at the club twice before they know what's going on. Somerset and Mills end up playing perfectly off of each other as their rival tension builds into a core disagreement in morals and life outlook. Supplements to the core plot weave in and out of the exposition. Sometimes they're give aways that tie together in the end, and sometimes they're something else that adds an unsettling edge to an already unsettling film ("Christ, what was his fucking name?") I guess the point of all this is that the people involved know their fucking shit. Freeman and Pitt are at the top of their respective games, and their dynamic is unbeatable. Paltrow is just so damn adorable that you can't help but eat her up at first, and feel like you owe her an obligation when she starts having troubles. Spacey is as chilling as they often come in the vein of serial killers with next to no screen time. And Fincher meanwhile sits behind the camera, tightly sweeping in and out of rooms at the perfect speed, giving us detail after detail in the design of the film, setting up an environment so real yet so imaginary that it chills us in its relatability and opens it up for us to question its distance from us. The breaks in tone come in discreetly and unintrusively... a rushed killing here or a spotty line of dialogue there, and then they tiptoe back out of the room, as if they were too scared to disturb the near-masterpiece filling the space. It's these tiny little imperfections that keep Se7en from being a perfect film. But let it stand that Se7en remains a movie as crazy as its premise, executed tightly in every sense of the word and chilling to the bone, and it can honestly be trumpeted as a success.