The Pale Blue Eye Movie Review

Movie Review 

Based on the 2003 novel by Louis Bayard, director Scott Cooper's The Pale Blue Eye finds Edgar Allan Poe at a time when his life is little known. In 1830, the 21-year-old poet entered the United States Military Academy at West Point. The mystery surrounding Poe's life at this time gives Bayard and Cooper great freedom—perhaps too much freedom—to tell a fictional story about him.

  Poe's characters often struggle to separate the human from the narrators in his poems and detective stories. Pale Blue Eye is no different, turning Henry Melling's Poe into a detective story of its own.  

 The mystery unfolds when widowed detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is called to West Point to investigate a sinister act at the academy. Not only did they discover one of their own cadets hanging from a tree; the heart was later cut out and stolen from the corpse. When Landor determines that the hanging was murder, not suicide, he enlists the help of an eccentric and brilliant young cadet: Edgar Allan Poe.

  Cooper immerses us in a terrifyingly interesting mystery centered on a detective who thinks with unprecedented depths. Landor is a complicated man, throwing himself into the fray while grieving his daughter's disappearance. It doesn't quite make sense that Poe's romantic thoughts could penetrate the hardened man so quickly, but the duality of their partnership is compelling nonetheless.

  As their investigation gradually unravels to reveal the lazy, cheap and exploitative components that are the driving force behind this mystery. Ultimately, Pale Blue Eye doesn't care about the depth of its characters—it uses Edgar Allan Poe's name only as fodder for a superficial story that takes a lot of creative liberties.