Wrong Turn 2021 takes a big departure from the classic series that we came to expect. Although the original screenwriter returned for the 2021 reboot of the movie, the film barely follows the previous movies’ formula. The film is filled with twists and turns and offers an action filled adventure through a brazen landscape. While the movie to a great extent, depends on its name and the legacy of its predecessors, but that might be the downfall for the movie to some loyal fans of the franchise. When creating a reboot, the franchise can no longer shake off the responsibility of the expectations that the viewers come with based on the original movie, and the better the original, the tougher to not let the fans down in a reboot.
The story that it tries to tell
Writer Alan McElroy who was the writer for the original 2003 fan favourite, and director Mike P Nelson (The Domestics,2018) hit us with a “fury of blunt story-telling”. The script cuts right to the heart of the divide between the urban and rural settings of today’s culture war, and a director’s statement calls it “A movie that reflects the state of mind of the world today”. The movie starts with Matthew Modine playing main protagonist Scott, scouring through Appalachian towns to search for his daughter who has gone missing. There is an ominous and hostile atmosphere setting up the next part of the movie. The movie goes into flashback when his daughter Jen played by Charlotte Vega, sets out with her boyfriend to trek through the Appalachian. They encounter the locals (who Scott would later run into) and they receive menacing warnings about not deviating from the official path. Like any good horror movie, the group ignores all warnings and heads off into an unknown trail where they run into a cult called “The Foundation” a community who have been cut off from modern civilization for centuries.
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Where the movie takes a wrong turn
The movie admittedly does not do a good job with building up the characters beyond stock archetypes and tokenisms. The storytelling feels almost amateur, and although there’s too much going on, there’s too little with terms of building up of a perfect story. The second half does get slightly better, but it is barely enough to salvage the first half. There’s very little that the movie does to deserve the “Wrong Turn” title, and some would think, it would have fared better if it was just created as an independent feature film.
