Ravenous
I can’t quite remember why I never watched “Ravenous” back in 1999. The trailers looked interesting, and the cast was a good one. It was probably a matter of other films becoming priorities for me at the time, along with the fact that it came and went in theatres with barely a blip. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m not sure if I’ll ever see it again. Antonia Bird’s film is fun, has some moments, but just didn’t really hook me into its dark story as I know it has others.
At the center of the film is an interesting character arc, however, for Boyd, played by Guy Pearce. When we see him at the beginning of the film, he is being awarded a medal for heroism during the Mexican-American War. He didn’t really act heroically, though; he played dead, was taken to the headquarters of the Mexican army, and placed at the bottom of a pile of dead soldiers. He does capture the headquarters after squirming his way free, but when his general (John Spencer) learns of what really happened, he posts Boyd to Fort Spencer, a remote outpost in Nevada where he’ll be away of real responsibility. That may not exactly be the case, however, when a stranger named Colghoun (Robert Carlyle) sets upon the camp, frostbitten, with a harrowing tale to tell. Boyd and the commander of Fort Spencer (Jeffrey Jones) go to investigate the story, but what they discover puts everyone at Fort Spencer at risk. Putting Boyd in a position to actually be heroic after establishing him as an accidental hero in the beginning is one of the most compelling things in the film, and Pearce is a great person to put in this type of role.
The most remarkable character in “Ravenous” is the score by Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn. There’s a haunting power to the unusual and imaginative music Nyman and Albarn create for this film that makes it difficult not to get sucked in to the film’s wicked story of cannibalism in the west even when Ted Griffin’s screenplay seems to be going with the most obvious choices in telling that story. I love the movie the music is wanting this to be; I just wish it was what the movie was. I know Bird was not originally the director, and the production had difficulties because of the way Fox 2000 interfered, but the issues seem to lie in the predictability of the script by Griffin more than anything she did, or Fox tried to do. How can a movie, a dark comedy even, about cannibalism be predictable? Just think of it as a typical horror film, and you’ll figure it out. I was more than a little disappointed by that in “Ravenous,” even if the cast (which also includes Jeremy Davies, David Arquette, Neal McDonough and Stephen Spinella) gives in to the wild premise, and Bird captures a solid balance between wicked laughs and gore. The film just didn’t quite work for me beyond the music.
