The Age of Commercialism

Memorable, crazy movie

Disappointment for a huge fan!

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

So many people here have come to this movie with modern eyes. Of course the SFX are going to look dated it was made 32 years ago! However, the movie is carried along (for the most part) by the visuals and the excellent (if mixed somewhat loudly) Tangerine Dream soundtrack.The story does seem to jump evidencing the loss of footage at some point and at someone's behest...I hope to see a Directors Cut one day if the "issues" with who/whatever has them ever get sorted. A new sound mix would be excellent to add more dynamic range to the audio, it seems a touch over compressed as was the style in the 80's.An unsettling movie somewhat let down by a chain of events starting with the death of the SFX head Wally Veevers. Add in some studio meddling and a whole bunch of other wrangling with Tangerine Dream and it's evident the movie isn't what it could have been.As for Paul F Wilson's opinion it's moot, as an author will very rarely think any adaptation lives up to what he envisioned.**The version from Netflix is currently the best quality anywhere in the wild**

This movie begins with a German army squad traveling through the Carpathian Mountains in Romania to secure the Dinu Mountain Pass during the first days of Operation Barbarossa during World War II. Commanding this squad is "Captain Klaus Woermann" (Jurgen Prochnow) who is both competent and combat experienced. Upon arrival at a small Romanian village near an abandoned citadel known as "The Keep" he decides to set up operations. What he doesn't know is that rather than being built to keep intruders out, "The Keep" was built to keep something--in. That being the case, it isn't too long before German soldiers are being killed by some mysterious entity despite the best efforts of Captain Woermann. Not long after he requests a relocation point, a special SS unit arrives under the command of "SD Sturmbannfuhrer Eric KKaempffer" (Gabriel Byrne) who takes command of the area and decides to execute villagers as a way of containing what he believes is partisan activity. But there is no partisan activity. Now rather than reveal any more of this movie and risk spoiling it for those who haven't seen it I will just say that this was an interesting movie which made great use of smoke and music to create a surreal atmosphere. Unfortunately, the director (Michael Mann) went too far with these stylistic enhancements which crowded out everything else. Along with that the special effects for the "entity" were clearly second-rate and that didn't help either. In short, the film had a good plot but lacked the necessary time to really develop which in turn limited the overall effect. Accordingly, I rate this movie as about average.

THE KEEP is an interesting, but frustrating, early film by Michael Mann. It features some good performances by Sir Ian McKellen, Gabriel Byrne and Scott Glenn, but they are all in service of a confusing, half-baked plot. The story set during WWII in Nazi-occupied Romania, where a malevolent force is wreaking havoc in a keep. Ian McKellen plays a Jewish scholar who is brought in to try and figure out what the entity is, and Scott Glenn plays a mysterious stranger who arrives and tries to keep the scholar from releasing the entity on the world. None of it really makes too much sense, and the version I watched on Netflix didn't help. The pan-and-scan framing took away from what was actually some stunning visuals, and it seemed like there was some material edited out at various points in the film. However, the real standout element was the soundtrack/score by Tangerine Dream. Combined with Mann's often hallucinatory images, it gave off the vibe of a quintessential 80's music video. And while the story was lacking, the hypnotic music was able to keep me interested in what the movie was doing visually. Overall, there's not quite enough here to recommend for everyone. It should be an interesting watch for die-hard Michael Mann fans, though.

I tried to like this strange movie. Looking more like a pantomime set rather than a film set, plus the T.Dream music that for me did not help but was intrusive and at times grated. There was a better movie in there somewhere, Maybe M.Mann's original cut? Sir Ian's accent was anything but Eastern European, more American than anything. I notice on his own site he says the director asked him to drop the Rumanian accent for a Chicago one, if true it sounds strange to say the least. The only actor who seemed believable to me was Jurgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne doing pretty much as every other actor doing the sadistic Nazi act does with the exception of the brilliant Christoph Waltz in Tarantino's 'Inglourious Basterds' I thought the monster quite good until 'it' opened it's mouth, it spoke with a better accent than Ian Mckellen. In my view this 'mish mash' was a missed opportunity.