Gold

It's a slow burn but it is what it is. Efron holding his own with the elements, sunburn and Susie Porter's accent. Susie holds her own against someone like Efron and its amazing to see in one of her post Wentworth roles. Hayes as sneaky as ever. Give the movie a go, you might just like it?

Tough one to sit through to the end a lost opportunity for something better in a Pandemic Flick. The storyline is meaningless, the scenery and desolation is fantastic. The continuous groaning of the lead actor in the desert wind is annoying. Everything was marginally improved by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in the closing song, made the whole show worth watching, allowed me to swallow the dry grit of disgust at the rest of the story. Not sure it even rates - marginally entertaining.

There's two reasons why this movie went straight to streaming - for Zac Efron to have a paid holiday, and the other reason is this movie a steaming pile of B/S I'm certain 99% of budget went to Efron, the cast and crew was paid with Monopoly dollars. Direction, other cast members, cinematography, script - everything else was atrocious. Typical for most Australian productions. Don't waste your time.....

Having tried to watch the recently released The Tourist, I didn't think anything could be as bad as that. Boy was I wrong. Once again we have the writer directing their own poorly written script, meaning there is no one to correct or point out mistakes. From the very opening scenes when the camera lingered on ants, I correctly suspected this was a written and directed by the same person film. The pacing is wrong, with the scenes waiting for the viewer to realise how much trouble the director has gone to get it looking right. The lack of dialogue is probably supposed to make the film more brooding but instead makes it unrealistic. The "twist" was visible from the beginning of the film, so there was no surprise. It would appear that the streaming services are desperate for content, and are digging around in the dirt to produce what they call gold, but is only fools gold.

Gold is what I'd like to refer to as a psychological survival thriller. It incorporates tropes such as man v/s nature, man v/s man, and fictional v/s real. The major bummer here is the lack of a compelling arc. A couple of twists work, and the ending is possibly the best one given the proceedings, but the film doesn't give us any reasons to root for Zac Efron's character surviving the ordeal. The "no man's land" setup is pretty intriguing, but writer-director Anthony Hayes (who also plays a key role) decides to take the story through familiar routes. A human threat, a wild dog threat, and a storm threat were all obvious, and the film didn't do anything extraordinary with these essential ingredients. Efron puts in solid work, no doubt, and the film isn't a big fat bore like many folks have remarked. But if someone asks what I'd recommend instead, I'd say Mads Mikkelsen's Arctic.