This is the second film in six months with youg EAP investigatiing grisly murders while training at west point .
Other than Pinocchio, why did studios in 2022 pick this particular fictional idea to go crazy for?
It is odd, but I love the premise.
Poe obviously had an obsession with the macabre, so it's within reason that if he had stuck around West Point, he may have tried to involve himself in a murder case to get an inside view of things.
Unfortunately this movie didn't really scratch the Poe itch for me. There were some references thrown in, but nothing that really tied into the story, unless I completely missed it. They really could have just used some fictional writer and it wouldn't have changed much for me.
I'll have to check out the other one. Hadn't heard of it until now.
Poe did write a short book called Landor's Cottage. (Bale's character is Landor.)
It's mostly just a very detailed description of the cottage, letting the reader imagine who Landor was and what he might have done.
Yep. I did catch that.
There was also a scene in which Poe recited a poem to the chick (I forget her name now), in which he calls her Lenore, which is a pretty obvious reference.
There are other things that I caught as well, like Poe's mother speaking to him. I can't remember the story, but I know EAP has made references to the living and dead world being one in the same.
Also the dealing with the grief of losing his daughter and committing murder are in parallel with The Tell-Tale Heart, though this is kind of surface-level at best. Plenty of stories have tackled that subject before and after Poe, but it was the way he brilliantly presented it to us in first person narration that set it apart, which we didn't have here.
Studios always seem to copy each other. Often they have scripts sitting on the shelf that were never approved, but then they hear someone else is doing a similar story so they get their own version out there.
See Wyatt Earp (and Tombstone), Mission to Mars (and Red Planet), all the Pinocchio films now, etc.