Raven’s Hollow is an origin story for Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.” This is not only unnecessary but also really fucking stupid. It’s unnecessary because EAP himself wrote a follow-up essay (“The Philosophy of Composition”) detailing how and why the poem came to be.
And it’s really fucking stupid because anyone who has read “The Raven” or has even the slightest familiarity with it will quickly realize that the events of the movie bear absolutely no relation whatsoever to the poem’s plot — or, for that matter, to the author’s overall body of work or his personal life; in other words, the film fails as both pastiche and biography, providing no insight into either the artist or the human being.
The title and a couple of mentions of the name “Lenore” are the only two things that the script has somewhat in common with the poem, and even those are a stretch.
The movie’s Raven doesn’t exist as portrayed by Poe — that is, as a common Corvus corax. Even when the poem’s unnamed narrator calls it a “thing of evil,” never does he rule out that it may after all be just an “ebony bird.” In other words, it may be a talking bird of ill omen, but then so are all ravens.
In the film, conversely, the creature is said to be “Black and winged in form,” but also quite literally a “spirit” and a “devil;” at the end of the day, though, in appearance and behavior the thing feels more like a home-bred cross between the Wendigo and the Creeper from Jeepers Creepers than anything remotely poesque.
As for Lenore, she doesn’t exist at all in the movie. Young West Point Cadet Edgar Allan Poe (William Moseley) “fancies” a “beguiling” wench called Charlotte Ingram (Melanie Zanetti, who at 37 is way too old for the real Poe’s taste; conversely, five years older than EAP when he died, Moseley is way too old to be a young West Point cadet); she confides in him that the Raven took her twin sister Lenore “and we never saw her again.”
Poe, however, will eventually learn that Charlotte “doesn’t have a sister, twin or otherwise,” and it was Charlotte herself that the Raven took (and brought back unharmed for some reason). Apparently, this pseudo-character that goes from mentioned-but-not-seen to utterly made-up somehow impressed Poe so much that years later he went on to write his most famous poem about her. Uh-huh.
Generally speaking, “The Raven” is a rather straightforward narrative — and so is, in its own asinine way, Raven’s Hollow (in a nutshell, “West Point cadet Edgar Allan Poe and four other cadets on a training exercise in upstate New York are drawn by a gruesome discovery into a forgotten community where they find a township guarding a frightening secret”).
At the end of the movie, when our hero sits in front of a blank sheet of paper and inscribes it with the title “The Raven,” you would expect him to set down what has just transpired in the course of the past 98 minutes, more or less as it happened.
The question, then, that the filmmakers needed to ask themselves is, what could have possibly made Poe decide to tell an entirely different tale, unrecognizable from the one that supposedly inspired him to begin with?
For example, why would he turn this monstrous, blood-thirsty beast into a literal, physically harmless raven? We’re told, via a voiceover, that “Due to the horrific circumstances of the matter, it is so ordered that the case shall be sealed and all records kept from the public evermore;” even so, Poe could have still written a thinly veiled, fictionalized account (a roman à clef, if you will) of the incident — assuming that the goal was to uncover the truth and set the record straight; otherwise, why write it at all?
Moreover, the question that we need to ask the filmmakers is why, since Poe for obvious reasons can’t (nor should he, if he could) rewrite his stuff to conform to the movie’s premise, didn’t they strive instead to find a way to reconcile their (for lack of a better, or in this case, worse term) vision with Poe’s canon?
Of course, in order to do that they would have to know something of EAP’s life and times — which they don’t. Moseley-Poe takes it upon himself to investigate a murder in the titular town, going as far as to “arrest” a black stableman (at least I think he’s a stableman, but all I have to go by is the line “Usher will see to your horses.” Oh yes, the black dude’s name is Usher, as in “The Fall of the House of…” I guess Edgar Allan must have thought that it would be a cool name for a reclusive, melancholy, white aristocrat, though if he did he certainly keeps mum about it), all the while declining to reveal exactly under whose jurisdiction and authority he does any of these things.
Speaking of this ragtag band of West Pointers, there’s a scene where Edgar scolds the others thus: “This is your field training now. What you do here decides the kind of soldier you will be.”
Odd choice of words coming from the man who actively sought to be discharged two years into his five-year enlistment, and literally had to find a patsy to finish his term for him (in the movie, conversely, “In the case of Cadet Edgar Allan Poe, this court concludes the charges to be true and sentences Cadet Poe to immediate discharge from the military academy.” Uh, what fucking charges?)
All things considered, Raven’s Hollow is just another entry in the misguided Poe-as-a-man-of-action genre — as well as the dumbest one to date (yep, it’s even more fucking retarded than The Pale Blue Eye).
90% of Everything is Crap 