SnoopyStyle It's 1867 in the town of Kingdom Come, Sierra Nevada, California. Daniel Dillon (Peter Mullan) runs the town. Donald Dalglish (Wes Bentley) comes to town to survey for the railroad. Lucia (Milla Jovovich) is a singer. Hope Burn (Sarah Polley) comes to town with her mother Elena (Nastassja Kinski) looking for her father. Twenty years ago, Dillon had sold his wife and daughter to another gold miner for a mine.It's moody, gritty, and meandering at first. It's not clear what's going on or even who the main characters are. It's a mystery slowly unraveled. It does payoff but it makes the audience work for it. It doesn't always flow fluidly. There is a stark beauty to the mountain location and the tragic characters.

neonwave-623-684821 ***Spoiler alert of a difficult scene involving horses*** Although overall a beautifully filmed movie with a great story, there is one scene that I'll never be able to get out of my head, that of the exploding chemical detonation materials wagon used by the surveyors of the railroad. It was not so much the presumed facsimile (were they?) animal parts lying in the snow near the burning, blown up wagon, but the haunting image (for what seemed an eternity) of the surviving horse dashing full speed away from the remains with it's body mostly on fire. I kept waiting for relief, for the fire to be quenched, but alas, this horse never did "drop and roll", and the scene is cut without resolution. As the movie was filmed on location in both Canada and the United States (Colorado), I waited expectantly to see the AHA credit (or Canadian equivalent) roll at the end to assure that indeed, no animals were harmed in the making of this film. There was no AHA credit or any other disclaimer. I searched online to see if anything had been written about this scene, and whatever happened to that horse, but have been unable to find any additional information. I want to believe that it was special effects, that the horse was not harmed. But it looked too real, and I'm sure that was the desired effect, to reflect what historically happened to working horses of that era.Please, if anyone has any other information to share about this particular scene, kindly post it. I don't want to discredit this otherwise engaging movie just because of this scene, if its animal actors were truly protected during filming.Thank you.

jake-179 What a total waste. This movie should have been good. It had great actors, great scenics, great cinematography, and no story. Perhaps the story was there, as it was an adaptation of a novel, but the director TOTALLY failed to tell whatever story there was to be had. The director did a great job of finding shots, and making the viewer feel as though he was experiencing a developing mining town in the 1800's, but there was just no cohesion of story telling. The pace of the movie was so slow, it was impossible to follow. One scene sets up, and you think as the viewer that you are going to being to get a feeling of what the movie is about, and then it just trails off and another scene begins. I thought it was especially stupid when the band of guys with guns confronts the band of rail road guys. Everybody pulls out their guns, the rail road guy shoots on of the town guys, and then all the town guys just turn around and walk away like nothing happened. The direction was so soft, so subdued, so poker-faced, that the movie never picks up any momentum and consequently fails in telling any real story. This is a failure of the director. This movie should be avoided. If you are looking for a good western about gold miners confronting greedy town folk, then you should watch PALE RIDER with Clint Eastwood. THE CLAIM was boring and pointless. The only reason I rated it a 2 instead of a 1 is because I thought it was shot well. One last point I want to make is the Wes Bently looked pretty much exactly the same in this as he did in American BEAUTY, sporting the same stupid snow cap. That kind of snow cap is a modern one, with an ELASTIC HEAD BAND, that did not exist in the 1800's. Again, a total failure on the part of the idiot that directed this disaster.

DocFilm In this otherwise engaging film, the speech by the female actors is disturbingly anachronistic. Their speech sounds like generic end-of-the 20th century American: rushed, slurred, decreasing volume and clipped or swallowed at the end of their sentences. The film is set in California, but long before Valley Girl became Hollywood movie standard. Contrast this with Mullan's "accent." The interpersonal communication, especially in the more casual dialog, displays a distinctly late 20th century urban/suburban attitude. This seems like a directorial problem, an attempt to produce a natural/"naturalized" immigrant speech which only a great UK actor like Mullan can do, while the others, from their European roots, have only the accents and speech patterns they absorbed in 20th century California and environs to fall back on (another IMDb commentator half humorously suggested that this regression was due to the very cold weather during the shoot).