Essential Killing

ESSENTIAL KILLING (2010) - Sept. 15, 2010
Someone needs to explain this movie to me.  Why did this particular story need to be told?  About a member of the Taliban (we assume -- the character never speaks and we learn nothing about him other than a couple of brief flashbacks that imply he has a wife) who is captured, escapes and then runs away through a seemingly endless snowy forest.  This could have been exciting and/or suspenseful, but we never learn a thing about the character and thus have no reason to care about him, so the whole thing ends up coming off as a pretentious excercise of some sort, despite the fact that it's reasonably well made.  *1/2