| THE OBJECTIVE
Reviewed by MICHAEL GINGOLD
Current events inform two of the genre films currently playing New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival: Daniel Myrick’s THE OBJECTIVE takes place against the backdrop of the war in the Middle East, while Jeff Fisher’s KILLER MOVIE puts a horrific spin on the endless reality-television trend. For THE BLAIR WITCH Project's Myrick, THE OBJECTIVE marks a return to the scenario of a group of people venturing into forbidding territory where mysterious forces threaten them,
Myrick, who scripted THE OBJECTIVE with Mark A. Patton and Wesley Clark Jr., pointedly avoids setting his military thriller in Iraq, which might have weighed the movie down with too much political baggage. Instead, the story takes place in post-9/11 Afghanistan, where CIA agent Keynes (Jonas Ball) hooks up with a Special Forces unit assigned to accompany him in seeking out a local cleric who can help win support against the Taliban. That’s Keynes’ cover story, anyway; he’s actually there to investigate satellite data that suggests a nuclear weapon is being secretly developed out in the desert. Accompanied by a local man, the squad heads out into the sandy, rocky wastelands, where the greatest threat would seem to be mines and armed attacks by their human foes.
Lansing on the same Moroccan locations utilized by the HILLS HAVE EYES movies, Myrick and cinematographer Stephanie Martin are able to elicit a sense of foreboding even in the sunlit, wide-open spaces. The deeper Keynes, Major Wally Hamer (Matt Anderson) and his men venture into the unfamiliar territory, the more hints they receive that they’re being shadowed by an inhuman enemy, and a few shades of BLAIR WITCH crop up: Maps fail to accurately reflect the terrain they find themselves on, and the group comes across a collection of odd totems that portend the paranormal. Rather than a vengeful sorceress, however, the threat may be something that is not and never was of this Earth, and that even the heavily armed soldiers are no match for.
Myrick ratchets up the tension incrementally, with a good amount of it deriving from the increasing conflict between Keynes and Hamer, as the latter comes to doubt the CIA man’s stated motivations for the mission that has started to claim the lives of his men. Ball, who was mesmerizing in last year’s Tribeca feature THE KILLING OF JOHN LENNON, brings a quiet intensity to his turn here, and stuntman/actor Anderson is equally forceful in a more outspoken manner. The supporting soldiers don’t have particularly defined characters, but they’re all believable as grunts—in part because, aside from BLAIR WITCH vet Michael C. Williams, they all have actual military experience.
While the threat confronting the team becomes more tangible as THE OBJECTIVE goes on, with fine use of odd and un-showy digital FX, it’s never fully defined. That will be intriguing for some viewers and unsatisfying for others, and at the finale, the subtlety of the supernatural elements gives way to a trippy, hallucinatory 2001-esque visual blowout that’ll have many scratching their heads. At the film’s debut Tribeca screening, Myrick stated that he wanted this ending to provoke discussion, and even if it’s more visually stimulating than dramatically conclusive, there’s something to be said for a genre movie that aims to stimulate speculation rather than neatly tying things up.
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