Nature is scary. No, more like terrifying! Imagine hiking a mountain only to be chased by a snake. Or go diving only to be stung by a jellyfish. Or let’s go cliche and swim in the ocean and be bit by a shark! How about be at your lakeside home, be stuck on a flood, only to find out that a swarm of crocodile are waiting to devour you? I mean, that’s a huge serving of, “HELL NO! Nope!” Well, Bingers, that’s what happens in Alexandre Aja’s Crawl and it was crazily terrifying!!!
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Feel The Wrath Of Nature
The movie started slow with the typical set-up for a nature disaster film. And that is an acceptable flaw because it was used to establish the key characters: Haley (Kaya Scodelario) and Dave (Barry Pepper). In the opening montage, Haley was seen practicing her swimming skills as she is a competitor herself. This was rather an in your face attempt of the filmmakers of telling the audiences, “hey, watch out! This is going to be necessary later in the film.” And that it did.
It wasn’t that long til a Category 5 hurricane hit Florida. There was no stopping nature from showing its wrath and the hurricane was just the beginning. An evacuation order was set in place but Haley’s father was nowhere to be found. For some reason, he went back to their old house.
Right, this had me scratching my head in cinema because it posed one gaping question, “WHY?” Looking closer at it, it did not make sense but I just learned to accept it as a necessary driver for the crazier wrath of nature: crocodiles in the wild!
Crawl For Your Life
In the veins of Jaws and Lake Placid, Crawl featured nature’s real-life apex predators and made them extra vicious! Aja obviously had a great time showing us through this film how feeble we really are against them!
Haley and Dave were not to be outsmarted by the predators, though. Despite taking in some snaps, throws, and bites, their will to live contributed to some exciting scenes in Crawl! While there are some smart decisions made by the characters there were also ridiculously questionable and outright stupid actions made! One way of looking at it was the characters were distressed and were not in the right mind to make right decisions OR the writers were just careless when making them.
Either way, Crawl made my heart jump…A LOT! Aja’s use of surprise and tension elevated the typical nature’s predator movie. Between decapitations and bloodfest are cringe-worthy dramatic father-daughter scenes. Crawl will make you cringe- both the good way and the bad way! It is bloody, crazy, and intensely exciting! It satiated my hunger for some good old nature’s wrath and predator goodness!
PS: to be honest, most of the tension came from me hoping this “one” character will make it out alive and unharmed! See the movie and you’ll know what I am talking about!
Director: Alexandre Aja
Cast: Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper
Binge-level: 3 out of 5 stars
