Retreat (2011)

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I was surprised with this one, surprised with where it went, surprised with the ending, just a good psychological thriller that had me asking what do you believe? Its along the lines of Dead Calm (replace boat with remote cabin) and admittedly kinda slow to get going but I did like the atmosphere and Scottish location.It follows Kate (Thandie Newton) and Martin (Cillian Murphy) as they try to repair their strained relationship by revisiting a remote island cottage where they were once happy. The cracks in their relationship start to grow worse though as he generator shorts out and radio signals to the mainland prove increasingly erratic. Then one day an injured soldier (Jamie Bell) is washed ashore. He claims that a lethal airborne virus is devastating the outside world, and they must barricade themselves inside the cottage if they want to survive.Lots of twists here, I mean I did not for a second imagine the airborne virus angle and I liked imagining how I would handle the situation, would I believe him? This wasn't a plot that I'd ever seen done before. The acting is also excellent, with just the three of them playing off each other for the most part. 11/1/15

Picture this: you're on a lone island, when out-of-the-blue a bloodied, exhausted, armed uniformed man appears. He says he needs to BOARD UP your whole house because there is a world-wide airborne plague that's killing everyone. So this virus… is it a foot long then? Perhaps he'd mistaken the virus for a large winged badger. It must be the largest virus ever found on Earth, about one hundred trillion billion times bigger than all the others combined, because it is evidently so enormous that it's incapable of passing through 3-inch gaps. So OBVIOUSLY the soldier must be lying. Right? Certainly you'd expect an educated couple – a journalist and an architect – to be at least half-way acquainted with Contagion 101 and Biology For Total Dummies to immediately question this stranger: "Oy, you: how the bloody heck do you expect to prevent an airborne virus from spreading by boarding up windows and doors? We breathe that bloody air, don't we? And as long as we have fresh air in the house that means some of that contaminated air is passing through. It's not as if only uncontaminated air molecules can slip through those openings… You bloody silly liar."Then again, I forget: journalists aren't the brightest cookies on this planet. They'd believe anything (just as they hope that we'd believe any old crap they write down). But if we eliminate the dummy journalist (Thandie), we're still left with the question how an architect (Murphy) could possibly be this clueless. Perhaps being metrosexual hampers his judgment? Dunno, just a wild guess.Due to the badger-sized flying-virus premise, from the start I didn't know what to make of this story. I had two clear-cut options/explanations: either there is a real plague out there but the movie's writers were too daft not to realize that airborne sickness can't be contained by simply nailing pieces of wood on windows, OR the soldier is lying which means we are dealing with a very dumb married couple. It's a no-win situation: either I have to contend with a poor script or with moronic characters. The common denominator of these two outcomes is certainly bad writing. Hence I knew something dumb was afoot.The other problem here is the typical movie-la-la-land conspiratorial the-army-is-out-to-get-us premise: a British soldier is used for biological experiments without his knowledge! Now, while some conspiracy-obsessed left-wing morons out there might consider this as a plausible scenario (because they hate democracies and consider every Western military institution to be some kind of devious, evil organization of the kind we see in computer games for daft 8 year-olds), I personally have grave doubts. First of all, in the UK there is plenty of money to be made by volunteering as guinea-pigs for medical testing. I have personally met several UK residents (all in their early 20s) who had done this, making an extra buck (as much as 100 pounds for a day's work) by spending a day or two, or a whole week in a variety of medical institutions. I.e. the UK military, if it really needed/wanted human test-subjects that badly, would easily find volunteers. There would be no need at all to conduct these tests on unwilling or unaware subjects, which would only pose potentially grave PR problems should this information be leaked to the media. (And unlike Marxist societies - which those same conspiracy-worshiping, gullible left-wing putzes so worship from afar in their comfy Capitalist-made sofas - in democratic countries such blatant and inhumane misuse of power does make it to the media very often.) Not to mention the laughable notion that the military would actually ALLOW someone to escape that easily from such an installation: all the way to a lone island even! If such human guinea-pigs existed in Britain, they'd be kept behind 5 sets of 10-meters thick steel walls and guarded around the clock by dozens of heavily-armed men. Now THERE'S a place from which even a molecule of air could not escape undetected.The only sensible and useful thing the writer/director could have done would have been to show Thandie Newton in the nude. That's the only potential I see in this script, and with this cast. The rest is baloney.

The story is quite simple and the storyline given on this website sums it up well. Anything else I write about it can give away important pieces of the story, so I will stay away from that.What I can say is that even thou it has a short cast, and it's not a very long movie, the script is pretty solid and the acting is really really good. The scenery is also great, the dialogues aren't over done and the pace in which the events happen, keep you wondering the whole movie.Other than 1 or 2 dragging moments, this movie kept my attention the whole time and I think most people, fans of the genre or not, will also be satisfied.This movie was really entertaining and I recommend it 100%, especially if you're looking for some sort of "end of the world/psychological thriller" movie to watch.

I went into this film with no expectations as I'd never heard of it before. It was a random rental (it was between this and Shark Night!) but had a strong cast so gave me a bit of hope it might be decent.Firstly... if the idea of three people alone in a house together for an entire film sounds dull then this one is not for you.I have to say I was pleasantly surprised with this film and enjoyed it more as it went on. Thandie Newton was very annoying early on in the film and Cillian Murphy wasn't far behind her. The characters also made some stupid decisions which is always annoying. But having watched it though it was actually a well acted and clever little thriller. One thing I liked about the film was that it keeps you guessing throughout... is he lying? is there a virus? should they trust him? The audience was in the same position as the characters not really knowing what was going on outside the door. And the conclusion was satisfying without leaving questions hanging.Not massively exciting, but all round a pretty decent film.