If you let me watch this movie, change the name of Edgar’s character and never tell me Edgar Allan Poe is portrayed in this movie, I would probably never guess the character is supped to be Edgar Allan Poe. But yes, there are some references to Poe’s work. Some more obvious than others. I was a fan of Poe as a teenager and there are several Poe stories that are a lot more captivating and much more haunting than this movie.
To me the main character, Landor, the guy hired to investigate bizarre and macabre events at the West Point military academy was more interesting to follow than the morose looking, but nonetheless slowly budding Poe.
The officers at the academy talked like brain damaged weirdos with a strange accent in my opinion. I was drawn to this movie specifially because of the setting. Am still sort of obsessed with the American Civil War and anything even remotely connected to it I have to see. West Point two decades before the outbreak of the war is interesting enough to me. I enjoyed the setting, but the officers looked like overly solemn re-enactors.
The plot is quite good, but there is not much room to get emotially attached to the characters, so it kinda doesn’t matter who dies and who lives.
Am not a big fan of Christian Bale, but he managed to ooze a lot of pain and sorrow out of his tortured character.
Not a bad movie, but it leaves you hungry for something that hits harder.
The Poe element hardly matters.
The start of the movie was the most enjoyable. The setting. The landscape. The intial shock of the people confronted with the bizarre events.
The weakest point is that throughout the movie you don’t really feel yourself rooting much for anyone and in my opinion this is also not the kind of detective story where you as the viewer can do much of the detective work.
For the acting, the setting, the costumes, one plot twist and some of the dialogues I would give it a 5,5 out 10.
I particularly liked what this article had to say about the movie.
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