Rugged American adventure-travel journalist Pete McKell (Michael Vartan) joins a cruise along a crocodile-infested river organized by tomboyish guide Kate Ryan (Radha Mitchell). As if dealing with their fellow travellers -- including obnoxious wannabe photographer Simon (Stephen Curry) and bratty British teen Sherry (Mia Wasikowska) -- wasn't enough aggravation, soon Pete and Kate must match wits against an enormous 25-foot croc that seems cleverer than most.
Having been less than impressed with the latest Alligator creature-feature in cinemas, Crawl, I was recommended to check out this slightly older film based around the larger and more aggressive Australian saltwater crocodile. For the first two acts at least, this was definitely the superior film.
Set in the Australian outback, one of the things that the film does really well is to really draw you into the location. With gorgeous vivid colours as the camera pans across the idyllic Australian outback landscape, it almost feels like a tourism advertisement. In a similar way to the first Jaws film, it keeps its creature hidden as long as possible, and for the first act, we get to spend some time being introduced to a myriad of characters. While most characters are rather one-dimensional, it still allows the audience to separate the group into people you want to survive, and people you wouldn't mind seeing gobbled up by a croc. Once you want someone to survive the experience, tension is guaranteed to follow as they are put in danger.
What Rogue does really well, is to set boundaries and limitations to the creature, with some laughably sombre crocodile facts being exposited to us, as well as adding a time-sensitive nature to our protagonists' troubles. When the water is dangerous, and the tide is coming in, it's a brilliant ticking timer device to push the narrative forward and allow more aggressive and risky behaviour to occur.
The real joy is how well adapted to its environment the crocodile is. We feel the fear, for most of the film, with only glimpses of a shadow, a tail, or a flash of teeth. This keeps the suspense and mystery there, while also protecting the audience from too much exposure to the CGI creature. The CGI in itself is good and does a reasonable job at showing the heft of the animal, but up close, you can definitely tell the creature is fabricated. Still, its amazing work for an independent film.
What works really well in Rogue, is having a large cast at the start. Crawl has two main characters with supplemental characters added in later, so it is predictable who will survive and who will not. Rogue, on the other hand, has a larger cast, with no new ones introduced, which means all deaths will occur within this group, but it could be any of them, and that really builds the tension.
The film does have a couple of jump scares, but is in general, really straightforward with what is going on. The characters are instilled with a genuine fear of the water's edge, they act like real people thrown into this dangerous situation, and the film feels all the more grounded for it. Even the gore is largely reduced, and not a huge part of the film. Everything is small-scale but super dangerous, and a situation that you could certainly see happen in real life.
Where the film does ultimately start to let the audience down, is in the final act when one of the characters goes from timid and uninvolved to the typical American "battle the monster, save the woman" character. Everything up until this moment was incredibly grounded in reality, but the final act felt clearly overexaggerated and felt like a tonal shift as well as a drastic change in the personality of the character. Going as far as to ignore all the other characters in order to serve the vastly different narrative jump.
Apart from the third act, Rogue is impressive. It uses known information about crocodiles behaviour to drive the story and creates a very realistic scenario that requires creativity on the part of the protagonists' to escape. Without any practical effects for the creature, it was a great decision to keep it hidden for so long, and made Rogue quite a tense film to watch