Fannish Fifty 006: Rogue (2007)
Rogue, 2007, R, 1h 40m IMDb
An enormous, hungry saltwater crocodile in the Australian wilderness scuttles a boat of tourists on a tidal island.
Click to view[This may contain spoilers. Probably.]I came across this movie when it was a recommended video after some documentaries. I love environmental horror movies, and I love crocs.
It begins with a scene parodying the opening of Lion King, a red sun rising. Pete McKell (Michael Vartan), a travel journalist, arrives hot and dusty in a quiet Australian town. The airport lost his luggage, and he acknowledges to a bartender that he isn't exactly dressed for the weather. The bar is just as quiet and dusty as the town and its people, showing a stark contrast to cityboy Pete. (When Pete complains about the bad phone signal, "the service here sucks," to his colleague back in Chicago, the bartender replaces the dead fly he'd previously pulled from the drink he was preparing for Pete.)
There's no mention of why Pete is in that region or why he's going on the river crocodile tours lead by local Kate Ryan (Radha Mitchell), because it doesn't seem to fit with what he says he usually writes, but anyway. He arrives with a cluster of other tourists, foreign and not. There's a family with a wife and mother dealing with cancer, a man who eventually pours ashes into the water, a couple who bicker more than anything else, a chatty smoker, and a photographer. Kate the captain is pretty and faces complaints and harassment with confidence.
Her dog, Kevin, is her constant companion and is a very good boy. Pete doesn't like animals, but everyone else does, and the smoker spends time cooing over Kevin and sharing a sandwich.
The tour boat, smaller than others on the same river, passes a boat displaying crocodiles' ability to jump out of the water. In a bit of foreshadowing, Kate replies that the boat is "big enough" compared to crocs possibly leaping in.
A couple local men tear around in a speedier boat, mooning the tourists before blocking the tour boat and harassing Kate. Neil Kelly (Sam Worthington) thinks he's God's gift to women and wants to know why Kate won't even get a drink with him. She firmly says that she'll count to three and start her own motor, ramming them, and Neil's companion takes off, throwing Neil off balance and into the water.
While filming the scenery, a tourist points out a distress flare. Kate says they have to check it out and radios there position, although the valley they're in interferes with the signal. The tourists complain that they have buses to catch, but if it was them, replies Kate, they'd want someone to come to their aid.
The source of the flares seems to be a turned over boat with no one around, and they're ready to return when they're struck by a great force. A massive saltwater crocodile throws the boat around, and Kate drives it into a muddy island. Everyone escapes.
With night coming, along with the tide, the island will disappear. The croc will not. To get anywhere, they have to swim. A tourist stops another from frantically swimming, but he's quietly killed.
The two yahoos from earlier find them on the island and are ready to tease them and drive away, but their boat is attacked. The driver is quietly killed, but Neil swims to the island and is rescued. He's knowledgeable about crocodiles and the area and has surprising leadership qualities. His idea is to swim quietly across the river with some rope and make a single line bridge for people to climb across.
It almost works. The first woman to cross gets tired and scared and freezes midway. The father forces his daughter onto the line and follows, ignoring everyone saying the rope cannot hold three people. On the opposite side, the croc attacks Neil on land. The rope shakes, and everyone falls but gets back safely.
Pete has the idea to bait their anchor and try to keep the crocodile occupied while the others swim across. What to use as bait? There's nothing but Kevin.
Which Kate refuses to accept and is ridiculed, but the photographer remembers the yahoos had a pair of birds that would make decent bait, but someone has to pull the line to make them seem alive. Pete's not much of a hero, but he starts to be around this time, offering to be last and to look after Kevin, who's left with him because crocodiles supposedly like the smell of dog.
Nearly everyone gets across. The daughter runs away in fear, and her mom runs after her. Everyone's told to just head upriver, where town is, leaving Kate and Pete and Kevin as the last ones.
Kate gets attacked, and there's even a scene with the infamous death roll. Pete and Kevin make it, but Kevin runs off. Pete follows him to a big tree with a hollow beneath it, a bit of Alice and the rabbit hole.
There was mention earlier that crocodiles store their kills in some nice hollow log or something, to eat later. (This is true, but experts don't seem to know the exact reason why. Crocs and gators are opportunistic and will eat any meat, regardless of freshness, although fresh is best. One theory is the rotting flesh attracts other scavengers, and they become the fresh meals. Crocodiles store fat from their meals, so when they're full they do not eat anymore. They eat maybe fifty times a year, because their metabolism is so slow.) The tree Kevin finds is the lair of the crocodile, and he finds Kate, who is miraculously alive although bleeding profusely.
This is where I take issue with the movie. Kate should be dead. Maybe killing all the locals seemed like a snub to Australia and their typical hardiness in a country where just about everything could kill them. There was not much of a love line, which I appreciated, just some suggestive stares.
Kevin tears off, detecting the croc, and is killed off-screen. Pete faces down the croc in this relatively crowded cave and only gets some fingers injured and possibly vertebra bruised, because he is thrown into the ceiling, but he fends off the croc with a big piece of wood he eventually stabs through the crocodile as it lunges at him. He then carries Kate's bloody body however far to where emergency services have found the remnants of their group.
The film ends with a newspaper clipping on the wall of the bar Pete first went into and remarked on the photos of crocodile attacks and survivors. The song over the end credits is Never Smile at a Crocodile, which most will recognize as the tune the crocodile in Peter Pan plays with the clock in its body.
Overall, this was a great movie. It focused on a very small place and select group of people. There were reasonable complaints and desperate acts, and they're not always the ones who died. The deaths were less vengeful, like these people are awful or stupid and should die, and more just...opportunity. You're told to not go in the water, and you're standing in it? Move fast, fella! (He didn't.) Even Pete's lack of care for Kevin made sense, with his personality and professed dislike of animals, although if he wanted to have a future chance with Kate, he should've made some effort to keep hold of her beloved friend.
My critiques are the dog's death, because there's no reason for it. C'mon. Give us some happiness at the end. There's no real attachment to any of the characters, although there is good snapshots of who they are, like the mom taking pills and looking rather skinny, suggesting she's a cancer patient on vacation for possibly the last time with her daughter. The man who dumps the ashes, probably of his wife, because he's traveling alone. The photographer, who salvages bottles of beer and critiques Pete's plan with the hook, is the one to recall the birds and retrieve them for bait, suggesting he's not just a shallow, humbuggy shutterbug.
Pete as a hero kinda falls flat. He's out of his element, and I'm supposed to root for him against a crocodile? Crocs have very tough skin; it's basically armor that's nearly impenetrable. Their skulls are all bone, so even attacking from inside the mouth isn't really going to go far.
Kate's survival is completely unbelievable. I did like her character, because she wasn't just some shrinking violet, but the only reasons she survived was her suggested feelings for Pete and possibly her being a local.
I mean, this crocodile, who only had some five or six minutes of actual screentime (which is another boon, personally, adding suspense), was fifteen feet or more; saltwater crocodile males can grow over twenty feet long. It was based off of Sweetheart, a seventeen foot croc that overturned boats in the 70s. Never killed anyone, but he drowned while being relocated and is now on display in a museum in Australia. Fun fact.
But this movie is available on YouTube and other platforms for free. It's not a heavy movie and comes in at about an hour and a half, excluding credits, and there isn't a lot of blood and gore until the end fight. I recommend it to fans of other environmental, man vs. animal horror movies like Jaws and even Jurassic Park.
