Director Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 masterpiece may be one of the most misunderstood gems of the year. Rather than opting for a simple take off on the Ryan O’Neal classic heist film, he instead focuses in on the consequences of the choices made by criminals and the deeply meditative state of life that can ultimately be a reflection of the crimes we commit throughout our years. “Drive” feels almost like that lost jewel of the late seventies and early eighties, a film that focuses solely on the aftermath of crime rather than the crime itself and zeroes in on a sole individual whose own choices have come back to haunt him and ultimately put him in a position where he must seek redemption before the evil corrupts the only good in his life.
It’s funny. Even with all of the technological improvements and modern facets that Wes Craven implements with “Scream 4” for his new Ghost Face Killer, this 2011 output of the “Scream” franchise still feels painfully dated and utterly irrelevant. At a time where slasher films were once old news and horror was a dead genre, “Scream” came on to the scene and revived both the slasher sub-genre and the horror genre once more. But during a time where horror has become choked with new directors, original visionaries, foreign artists, and remakes galore, “Scream 4” feels much too little and much too late. “Scream” maintained a firm relevance through the years for quite sometime because it was a welcomed revival that brought to mind why we liked the genre in the first place. But with the film industry becoming more and more a bastion for the new filmmaker with at home technology that allows him to cut a film in under a year so easily, “Scream 4” doesn’t really do much for the genre. Had this entry arrived five years ago I can safely say that Craven would have surely been welcomed in to theaters by yours truly, but there simply is nothing left to do with the “Scream” premise.
What we see in “What Lies Ahead” is a group of people trying to prove someone wrong. At the end of the first season they were told by Doctor Jennings from the CDC that there is nothing in the world, and there is simply no hope. Which is why he attempted to commit suicide with the group aboard.