Director – Tanel Toom, Screenplay – Malachi Smyth, Producers – Jorg Bundschuh, Pippa Cross, Ivo Felt, Ben Pullen && Matthew James Wilkinson, Photography – Mart Ratassepp, Music – Gert Wilden Jr., Visual Effects – Batelion GmBh (Supervisor – Andreas Alesik) & M.A.R.K.13 Com GmBh & Co KG (Supervisor – Videk Sedlacek), Special Effects Supervisor – Sami Tammi, Production Design – Kaia Tungel. Production Company – Allfilm/Kick Film/Sentinel Entertainment/Crossday Productions/Stigma Films.
Cast
Kate Bosworth (Corporal Cassidy), Lucien Laviscount (Sergeant Sullivan), Thomas Kretschmann (Sergeant Thomas Hendrichs), Martin McCann (Private Richard Baines)
Plot
The year 2063. Earth has undergone a drastic rise of ocean levels and only two continents remain, both at war with each other. The Sentinel is a platform that has been built in mid-ocean to guard against any incursion from the other side. However, it is months past the time the relief crew was due to arrive, while communications with home base go unanswered. The four person crew of The Sentinel are at the end of their tether and rankle under the tough and autocratic commanding officer Sergeant Hendrichs. The appearance of a seemingly abandoned vessel seems to offer some hope.
Last Sentinel – not to be confused with The Last Sentinel (2007), which was also about a soldier in a post-apocalyptic world – was the second film for Estonian director Tanel Toom, who had previously made the festival-acclaimed Truth and Justice (2019). The film was shot in Tallinn in English using an international cast.
The opening of the film charts out a Post-Apocalyptic world where most of the surface of the world has been drowned by Global Warming and all that remains are two continents on opposite sides of the ocean – in the animatic that appears, one of these appears to be located around Greenland and the other on the easternmost Russia/China coastline. In other words, it is a Waterworld (1995) scenario.
However, Waterworld and Last Sentinel sit almost at opposite extremes – Waterwold is a big action spectacular set on water, while Last Sentinel is a film that is quiet to the point of inaction – it takes place in a single location and is almost all psychological tension between the characters. Although one common point between the two is how the artefacts from present-day world acts as sentimental mementoes from a salvaged, half-forgotten past to which the survivors cling.
Kate Bosworth as Corporal Cassidy in the control room of The Sentinel
Last Sentinel is a film where little happens. Tanel Toom has stripped everything else away to the point there are only four characters and a platform at sea (some fine production design that makes The Sentinel looked convincingly lived in). Everything else in the film is imagined – about what is out there, what has happened to the relief crew and what the mystery ship that turns up is, even whether there still is an enemy or a home to return to. To this extent, the film resembles other SF works like Screamers (1995) and Alien Invasion: S.U.M.1 (2017) about people at an isolated outpost dealing with mysterious happenings that may or may not all be in their imaginations.
Within this bare stage that he creates, Tanel Toom creates some great psychological tension. Particularly good is the starkness of the scenes early on where Thomas Krestchmann is prepared to blow the abandoned ship out of the water after Lucien Laviscount fails to respond, having turned his radio off. There are some tight and very well tuned performances from all involved, especially the tough, tightly disciplined one given by Thomas Krestchmann.
The main problem with the film is that not much happens. The direction is fine and the performances excellent, but a lot of the film is just nothing happening other than character tensions. The film does eventually arrive at quite an interesting ending that holds a decent surprise in the tale but you feel like with a running time just shot of two hours, that Toom could have found his way there sooner.
