Saw The Objective, a horror film. It's not horror in the sense that Stephen King is horror, but in the sense that H.P. Lovecraft is horror. It follows a CIA operative as he attempts to make contact with a cleric in Afghanistan with a team of soldiers of some elite kind or other. We almost immediately discover that this is only a cover story however, when the operative scans the cleric's room with some kind of camera and hastily pockets a toy plane which makes his display glow like the sun. Eerie establishing shots of aerial maps and silent, staring women in burkas set up an otherworldly mood to the film.
As the soldiers march into the holy mountains, which God has forbidden man to tread, other strange images show up in the heat-sensitive camera. There's an absolutely ghastly shot of one character, seemingly alone, but surrounded by ghostly figures in the camera. Soon the men are dying one by one and being disintegrated by alien magic. The film is slightly unsatisfying in that explanations are not very forthcoming (the CIA dude has a big reveal scene where he just says "we don't know" over and over.) but I admire the bravery of a film which can remain oblique. The ending goes full-on 2001 A Space Odyssey and is pretty cool.
The film engages in a bit of the time-honored mysticism of the orient. I know it's kind of shoddy to make mysteries of the completely comprehensible lives of foreign people, but as long as you can forgive slightly retrograde politics, or perhaps if you can catch hold of the Kipling/H.G. Wells/H.P. Lovecraft thread, the update to modern times is extremely clever and well done. The aliens are utterly otherworldly and though they are never center-stage with rubber suckers and all, they are still felt as a palpable mood and presence. I really dug this film. It's not great mind you, (it really suffers from some acting-class performances sometimes,) but it's much better than I was expecting and that's always nice.
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