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The advertisements for The Edge sell the movie as a bear-attack flick, but it's much more than that. It's a harrowing tale of two men who don't know whether they can trust one another who must work together in order to survive.

Having said that, however, the bear attack scenes are truly incredible. In fact, they contain some of the most intense filmmaking I've ever seen. Jurassic Park ain't got nothing on The Edge. It's one thing to see mechanical and computer-generated dinosaurs munching down on hunters in The Lost World. It's another thing entirely to see a huge Kodiak bear in hot pursuit of a man down a stream bed. Lunging forward with the momentum of a runaway train, the bear snaps its jaws and swings its paws, an unstoppable force of overwhelming power and ferocity.

As we can expect from a screenplay by David Mamet (who also gave us Glengarry Glen Ross and The Verdict), The Edge gives us much more than just action sequences. The movie works just as well in the lulls between the bear attacks, when Baldwin and Hopkins dance around the entire subject of the affair. Just before their plane crashes into a flock of geese, Hopkins turns to Baldwin and says, "How are you planning to kill me?" But Baldwin denies any knowledge of what Hopkins says. "Why would I want to do something like that," he says later. "For the money," says Hopkins bluntly. Yep, it's the old The Postman Always Rings Twice plot, transferred to the Great White North (interestingly, Mamet wrote the screenplay for the 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice). But does Hopkins' wife know about Baldwin's plans? And what exactly does Baldwin have in mind? "I think you got a whole stew of too much money," he says jokingly.

For a movie filmed in great open spaces, The Edge is one of the most claustrophobic movies you'll ever see (in the tradition of great claustophobic movies, such as Das Boot). Cinematographer Donald McAlpine places his camera up close to the actors, rarely backing away for long shots. He locks us into the battle between the two men. And when the bear shows up, the claustrophobic close-ups will make you feel the hot, heavy breath of the bear as he lunges at the camera. Director Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors and Mulholland Falls) plays the entire movie in close-ups, with the effect of making us feel the desperation and anguish of the lead characters. We aren't just passive observers. Tamahori's use of the camera thrusts the audience into the action, hitting us with an icy spray and thrashing us with pine branches. When the camera does deliver long shots, Tamahori feeds us stunningly desolate, nearly-vertical mountain faces. The terrain conveys a magnificent and brutal power--an immensely inhospitable land of twisted rock and tortured pine trees.




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