I really wanted to like this. I've had a lifelong interest in Poe, ditto West Point, ditto mysteries in general. But wow, this film just isn't very good. It's a slow, overlong, sadly uninvolving costume drama with a bunch of good actors -- including, weirdly, a handful of familiar British stars cast as West Point brass -- looking exceedingly stiff (and not in a good military sense). Except for Poe, I found it hard to tell the various cadets apart; they all looked stern and talked in haughty, stagey-sounding accents.
To its credit, this two-hour film definitely gets livelier in its final half hour; but overall, any random episode of "Inspector Morse" is likely to be better plotted, better written, and more gripping. While I haven't read the novel the film is based on, I strongly suspect that despite its nifty premise -- "Hey, let's set a murder mystery at West Point when Poe was a cadet there!" -- it is probably, in execution, as plodding as this film.
Disappointingly, you actually get to see very little of the military academy; instead, most of the action takes place in taverns and cabins and fancy dining rooms, or in the snowy woods. Despite the lengthy run time, we never get a good sense of the geography. West Point itself looks ridiculously understaffed, as if the entire institution is run by the same three British actors! All of them strut around looking sinister and secretive and bad-tempered for no apparent reason, except, I guess, a need to make the proceedings seem more interesting.
The good news is that Christian Bale makes an appealing 19th-century detective -- he wears an air of authority and seems genuinely sympathetic and intelligent -- and Harry Melling makes a dramatic, vividly romantic young Poe. Granted, it's unlikely the real-life Poe was as mannered and eccentric as the character in the movie, who also seems a bit too old and wise beyond his years. Still, as Melling plays him, he's never less than watchable.
