eganehlers

In any movie when the lead characters are under siege or being stalked, it helps greatly if they behave in the most intelligent way possible. When their intelligent choices fail, the audience sympathizes and also feels a sense of growing dread.

You see this in a movie like Alien, which is of a different genre but not so dissimilar in basic structure. In that movie the characters, mostly scientists and technicians, make the right choice at every juncture based on the information they have, and still keep failing. There's conflict in the group, but the dissenting characters always eventually do as told. The constant failure of intelligent choices is a large part of what makes the movie scary.

In Southern Comfort you have a group of National Guardsmen, a few of whom seem to have a pretty good grip on things, and five or so who are flat out stupid. The choices of the stupid characters drag down the entire group. That could be one theme Walter Hill was intending to explore, but I doubt it, because later, when the competent characters are finally in control, they also make bad choices.

I'm not saying this bothers me because I think soldiers are smart or that their training always works. That's immaterial. The problem is that a group of stockbrokers or bus drivers or flamenco dancers could make better choices, so it isn't what this says about soldiers that's important, but what it says about the writers' estimations of audience intelligence.

But okay, since the first bad choice is made during the opening credits when one character callously cuts through a fishing net (not a spoiler), we know the soldiers are going to bring trouble on themselves due to their sense of macho entitlement. The idea that soldiers make enemies just by their mere presence in alien territory is clear, and has been explored in documentaries like Hearts & Minds, so I get that. And on that level Southern Comfort works fine.

The action is also pretty good because it isn't over the top. There's a dynamite explosion that puts CGI to shame. The ground actually shakes for real. So on a visceral level the movie is pretty good. And it's decently directed by Walter Hill. He would do better later, which is good, because there are some continuity fails here, including one scene where a character's wound changes sides in a cutaway, but basically it's well done and under what I imagine to be difficult circumstances.

But when the characters can't get even the most basic strategic choices right, it's tough to enjoy the movie fully. Watch it for the setting, action, and some Cajun slice of life scenes at the end, and maybe watch it to see Walter Hill playing with some ideas he'd make work better in his 80s movies, but don't expect Southern Comfort to thrill you.

Objectively speaking, this was a very bad movie. Your feelings about it may depend on your own IQ, or possibly just your age and level of life experience, but for me, there was nothing— and I mean absolutely nothing—discussed here that was insightful.

The acting is atrocious across the board, completely lacking in nuance. This is particularly true of Tom Sizemore as the villain. This is mainly a problem of writing and direction, since I've seen some of these actors succeed in other roles. But here, working under a relative novice director with little or no time and budget for the multiple takes needed to really nail a performance, they have little chance.

I agree with the commenters who believe the religious aspects of the movie were insulting. The scene where the seminary student baffles Steven Baldwin by suggesting that faith in the structural integrity of a building is equivalent to faith in god is laugh-out-loud funny. That old chestnut of a fallacy wouldn't have baffled a high-school honors student, let alone a genius.

Like other commenters, I agree that ultimately the film was bound to fail, simply because of its agenda. You can't prove god exists. There is no way, in language, science, or philosophy, that it can be done. Recycling discredited bits of medieval philosophy, and also wrapping an Intelligent Design thesis in sheep's clothing can't change that.

If you're one of the many religious people who happen to also be intelligent, I think you'll be annoyed by the film. If someone is going to argue on your side, you want the top dog in there doing it, not the second and third string. A dose of eloquence, and a reluctance to resort to old Sunday school canards, could have made this a really good movie, engaging for religious and non-religious alike. Didn't happen here, though.

Lastly, the film had no arc, no tension, no frisson. It had nothing to do with saving the world, only with saving Washington, D.C., the loss of which some people might not consider a terrible thing. Seriously though, I think the fact that the writer-director here perceives the loss of an American city as the end of the world says more than anything I can about how overblown, ponderous, and egocentric this exercise was. I give the guy credit for his ambition, but he needs some post-grad learning, or at least a heck of a lot of reading, to effectively succeed in his goals. I have to call this an almost total failure.