Mads Mikkelsen is lost. Stranded alone somewhere in the Arctic Circle, he survives off fish and the plane in which we can only assumed he crash-landed. His distress beacon -- which we can similarly assume he uses to signal daily -- apparently works, as one day a helicopter appears in the sky. When it crashes in a sudden gust, we can see the hope draining from Mikkelsen's eyes. In a film with only two (?) actors and maybe enough dialogue to fill a single page, the weight is almost fully on Mikkelsen. He carries it admirably through physical strength and endurance and just enough actual acting skill to remind us that we're not watching a documentary.
The lone survivor of this latest aircraft crash is so badly injured she can barely move, and indeed doesn't move during the film. Mikkelsen works tirelessly to help her instead and eventually discovers the location of a building he estimates to be a few days' walk away. Lashing his nearly comatose companion to a sled, he drags her across the ghostly landscape, along snow drifts, across rocky outcroppings, and through icy crevasses. They never make it to the potential shelter. It's amazing they even survive the half-distance they travel together, considering the frostbite, polar bear, and broken bodies they suffer en route.
Oops, was that a spoiler? I suppose so. But did you really expect them -- or at least him -- to not survive? Unless you've seen Open Water, surely not. No, this is the film of man-against-nature in which man does not win, but does survive. At the last, another helicopter appears in the sky, and the deus ex machina is enough to make you wonder if this was all some strange Greek tragedy.
It was not. Gorgeously photographed by Tómas Örn Tómasson, the arctic comes thrillingly to life and captures the bleak aesthetic of a man alone against an infinite void. And while Mads is amazing, so are the athletes on American Ninja Warrior. The rest of Arctic is so dull, it's almost not worth commenting upon; narratively plain, lacking insight or depth, and only featuring a single brief encounter with a polar bear. It's so realistic it also suffers the boring realities of life. This is a survival film of Mikkelsen, sure, but also of the audience. You may not make it out alive. Or awake.
No comments:
Post a Comment