Nick Grimm (grimmna)

Quick review:

Simply said, if you've not played Warcraft or the likes, you're probably best not to waste your time.

I thought they did an excellent job of choosing the subjects in the documentary, other than that I was a bit bored. The people the two hours focus on are interesting, but somehow they fail to really develop each person's story.

The film is slow at times, and other than one instance, I simply didn't care. I had a good idea how it was going to play out after the first 20-30 minutes, and think it would have been better suited for a shorter 60-minute type 'True Life' television show.

As someone who has played the games, been there and done that, and somewhat can understand the characters.. It is OK at best. Otherwise, you're probably going to be asking yourself why you're wasting time watching it.

This movie is certainly not without its flaws, but I really enjoyed it. 4-stars may be kind of high given some of the issues, but what was unique and done well makes it worth the effort. So I'll call it 3.5 stars + 0.5 for good measure.

The movie surrounds a family that meets up over Christmas vacation. A husband and wife, with three children, meet up with the wife's sister and husband and her two children at their home in the mountains?/country. This is one of the first problems I had with the movie, is it took too long to figure out the whos and whys surrounding the characters, everything was thrown together, and felt you had to plod through too much to figure things out. A lot (character wise) is also rushed and left undeveloped and unexplained.

Another problem surrounding the characters was the stereotypical biases. The "liberal" star-system tree hugging family vs. the more strict hands-on spanking family dichotemy was overdone. While there is never a clear preference or bias in the parenting angle, the polarized family dynamic seems forced after awhile.

While there, the children basically become infected with a virus, which leads them to at best questionable behavior, and at worst homicidal behavior. The story develops around that premise, and it doesn't take much to figure out where it goes from there.

The pacing of the film was excellent for the first 2 acts and did a great job of pulling me in, but the 3rd act once everything was established seemed to drag on and I found myself wishing it kept pace with the first hour.

Overall the writing and directing was good, and I'd like to see more of Tom Shankland's work, but there were a lot of plot holes and questions unanswered when the movie is said and done. More than I'd like in a movie, but again, this movie really did go out on a limb to make some things happen, took a lot of chances with the children's content, and it deserves to be noted that they pulled a lot of it off, and with a bunch of unknowns in the process.

My big gripe other than an occasionally messy story, is for such a beautiful setting, and with such an opportunity to develop the isolation, the cinematography is weak to say the least. I'd have liked to have seen the environment featured a bit more.

Overall, solid effort. I'd only recommend it to horror fans, and someone who is tolerant to a few obvious plotholes and undeveloped story.