Jess and I went on a double date yesterday with our friends Cathy and Keith (huh, I’ve never really used the term double date before, it’s a little weird), and we decided to go see The Raven, a fictionalized story about the last days of Edgar Allan Poe’s life and a serial killer bringing his works to life. Jess is actually a pretty big Poe fan, so she had been looking forward to the movie since it was announced. I, on the other hand, could take or leave Poe, but was looking forward to see what they would do with the material.
First things first, we both agreed that John Cusack made a pretty good Poe. I will let Jess enlighten you with her take of the movie (ha, challenge thrown!), although she did tell me this morning that it was growing on her the further away from it she got. I found it to be a slightly above average suspense movie, and I found the Poe references to be a bit lacking. Outside of the abundance of Ravens in the movie (something like twenty, I get it already), it really did seem to be about 20 minutes between isolated Poe story references (rather than being the undercurrent throughout the story). I was in the right ballpark as to the culprit, although for the wrong motive (although the motive did seem to come out of nowhere). We were all jarred by the end credit sequence, which Cathy correctly identified as something out of a 007 movie and was completely out of place. I felt like they made the end credits first when it was a different movie but didn’t have the budget to redo it after they went in a different direction. Just my theory though.
In all, I’d say that if you have an interest in Poe, you could go see it. It is a bit gory at times, although I thought it could have been a lot worse. Definitely not a kid’s movie though. The more you know about Edgar, the more enjoyment you’ll get, although it does kind of plateau after a bit.
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I agree about the lacking references to the stories. I love poe so more depth would have been nice. I did like it tho and we had a great time with you guys on our “double date”! John does look just like Poe. It was an interesting story line. I have always said that horror movies might give some sicko ideas so this film reinforces that throry and may even ironically spark someone to try to copy the murderer in this movie.
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