Poor Daniel Myrick. After all but setting the world on fire a decade ago with The Blair Witch Project (co-directed with Eduardo Sanchez), a film that managed to grab headlines in the summer of The Matrix, Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, and The Sixth Sense, he returns now with The Objective, a film that is split by two opposing instincts: recapturing the glory of his initial success and expanding his vision to a scope that would suggest he’s ready to move on to a studio feature. Neither instinct is satisfied by either the film’s plotline or its execution, leaving us to wonder what movie he really wanted to make.
In the weeks following 9/11, the United States government picks up a strong heat signal emanating from the remote mountains of Afghanistan. The first suggestion, of course, is that the Taliban has gotten hold of a nuclear weapon, but there are intelligence reports that it is, in true horror movie fashion, something ‘much more powerful’ (if that sounds verbose, it’s reflective of the film itself; the voice over narration hardly ever shortens Central Intelligence Agency to C.I.A.). Immediately, agent Benjamin Keynes (Jonas Ball) is sent out to find their source, Muhamad Aba. The entire mission is guaranteed to go smoothly however, since he is unable to explain his mission to the army crew’s Chief Warrant Officer Wally Hamer (Matthew R. Anderson), is working through the cultural barrier with their guide Abdul (Chems-Eddine Zinoune), and they’re looking for something of unknown origin that is potentially more powerful than a nuclear weapon. Just kidding, no smoothness.
For the entirety of the mission, Keynes relays footage of their mission back to Langley via his video camera/satellite/thingawhatsit, which somewhat resembles the red screen through which the Terminator saw everything in those movies. A good deal of this footage is edited into the movie itself, which is the biggest nod to Myrick’s prior work, as well as something of an unfortunate visual reference: the resolution of that footage isn’t all that different from that of the rest of the film. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if this was another ‘found footage’ piece, but the film is so clearly a spiritual descendant of tech-and-monsters classics such as Aliens that the divergence can’t help but take away from the experience. One of the revelations of The Blair Witch Project was its ability to use misdirection to make its low budget not merely an asset, but integral to the experience. Here, the budget contrasts so sharply with the promise of aliens and the setting of war-torn Afghanistan that it strikes the viewer as a hindrance, although it’s entirely possible that it in no way limited what Myrick wanted to show.
The other thing that worked last time around that doesn’t quite work in this outing is the sense of group dynamics at play. The criticisms that I have heard most frequently leveled against Blair Witch (other than the camera work and the fact that it isn’t all that scary) tend to involve the lead actors Heather, Michael, and Joshua, and how frustratingly dumb and irritating they can be, but that’s kind of beside the point. No matter how often they obscure their camera subjects when they’re upset, or how much they rely on profanity when their imaginations cut short more eloquent ruminations, they always behaved in a way that would be expected of people under dire circumstances, and always reacted to things in an immediate way. Here, even with the clear distinction between fancypants C.I.A. agent/rag tag Army guys/mysterious, quiet Muslims, none of their reactions to the bizarre and inexplicable events surrounding them ever feel organic or random. They seem more like the highly exaggerated emotions of recognizable archetypes of older movies, all of whom would be benefited by being played by Bill Paxton.
In the end, The Objective is not a bad movie. It’s poorly defined, but it’s not the affront to intelligence that you might worry it would be. But it could have been a really good movie, and has enough good ideas that it isn’t hard to see how.
DVD Bonus Features
The DVD also contains the trailer, a short ‘making of’ featurette, a Tribeca Film Festival Interview with Myrick, and an interview with Director of Photography Stephanie Martin.
"The Objective" is on sale October 13, 2009 and is rated NR. Drama, Thriller, War. Directed by Daniel Myrick. Written by Daniel Myrick & Mark A. Patton. Starring Jon Huertas, Jonas Ball, Matthew R Anderson , Michael C Williams, Sam Hunter, Jeff Prewett.
