Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour, 38 minutes
Director: Joe Penna
Quick Impressions:
Mads Mikkelsen is so cool, especially when he’s in the Arctic Circle fighting off a polar bear. (Sometimes I think I’m drawn to Mikkelsen just because I love his awesome alliterative name. He should do a movie with Stellan Skarsgård, another name I swoon over. I’d die to see their marvelous monikers together above the title of some European spy thriller. Well, die might be extreme. But I’d pay.)
Everybody knows Mads Mikkelsen because he’s been in Casino Royale and Rogue One and Dr. Strange and popular TV, but I particularly love him in the spellbinding Danish film The Hunt, nominated for Best Foreign Film the year The Great Beauty won. If you haven’t watched The Hunt, you definitely should (but be warned, Mikkelsen plays a man falsely accused of molesting a little girl, so it’s a pretty tense film).
Arctic is intense, too. It’s a simple story with little dialogue, few characters, and a premise and plot that are essentially interchangeable. A man is stranded in the Arctic and struggles to survive as he hopes for rescue.
That’s it.
Well, there is one key complication driving the story. Early on, Mikkelsen’s character becomes responsible for saving the life of a severely injured woman. (I don’t consider this a spoiler because you see her in the theatrical trailer.)
How will they survive? Can they find help? Will they be rescued in time?
The Good:
I’d say at least 80 percent of this movie is a guy trudging through the snow dragging a near comatose woman behind him on a sled. Imagine that, then believe me when I say the cinematography is gorgeous and the story is riveting.
Survival is always captivating stuff. We humans are hard wired to pay attention to scenes of fellow humans working struggling to be killed by nature.
This movie was filmed on location in Iceland, obviously in a pretty remote spot. From the looks of things, it’s just vast, desolate blankets of white snow covering black rock for miles in any direction. It’s the kind of place you can only get to by plane crash (or helicopter crash, if you want to risk that). Nobody actually lives in such a place except for a bunch of fish and one surly polar bear. You don’t stay there and put down roots. You get rescued, or you die.
As the story opens, Mikkelsen’s character (Overgård, according to the credits) seems pragmatic, capable, and patient. He’s crashed, but he knows how to fish, and his plane provides some shelter. He can afford to wait for a while. But a couple of developments drastically speed up the timetable. He can no longer afford to stay put and wait for rescue.
The whole thing seems like an obvious metaphor for life. “This is us,” I told my husband. “I’m the one who’s always on the verge of death, and you’re dragging me like dead weight behind you, marching us forward for the sake of survival.”
He disagreed. (Imagine if he hadn’t! The polar bear fight would have then become the metaphor for our marriage.)
But whether or not I’m the comatose one on the sled, life is a constant struggle, so we watch this representative of the human race doing everything he can to live, and we identify with his struggle. It’s our struggle, too.
Arctic‘s cinematography is also excellent. Some of the shots of the landscape are just breathtaking, and I also appreciated the careful framing of each shot of the human characters.
The punishing trek he is making across that endless snow looks almost epic, like something from Lord of the Rings. The film is also a bit similar to that Robert Redford drama at sea, All is Lost. Most of the time, it’s just Mads Mikkelsen and the snow (almost).
Lots of survival movies (and climbing films) flickered briefly through my mind as I watched, but Arctic is definitely not a Hollywood blockbuster filled with unrealistic action and fantasies of derring-do. This is a very quiet film about a man fighting for life.
Mikkelsen’s performance is excellent. Very little of it is verbal (though he does sometimes talk to himself like a normal human being). Through his facial expressions and body language alone, he conveys so much emotion and gives us insight into his interior torment. He’s an incredibly sympathetic protagonist. We are with him all the way. The character is also a great, positive example of non-toxic masculinity. He’s everything a man would wish to be without being any of the things a woman would wish he weren’t.
(I kept thinking of the Red Buttons character in The Poseidon Adventure as I watched. Many times in my youth, my mom and I laughed about how the Nonnie character is able to survive entirely through his efforts though she contributes absolutely nothing. (In fairness to her, she’s in shock.) But finally I realized, “Yes, but helping her to survive gives him something to focus on and ends up helping him to survive.” What’s happening here is something quite similar.)
Both my husband and I thought the film has a lovely, powerful score, and I really enjoyed the crisp, clear sound in general. (We always hear him zip his jacket, crunch through the snow, open a flare.)
We also found it delightful that the polar bear was listed by name in the closing credits.
(Speaking of credits, early in the film, the character catches fish. I suddenly wondered, “How can they show him catching fish on camera when movies always say that ‘no animals were harmed in the making of this film’? Fish are animals. Do all movies with fishing scenes have to use fake fish?” I realize this sounds idiotic, but the movie has little dialogue, so that thought plagued me until the very end of the film.)
Best Scene:
I like what happens after the enormous pit. (When you see it, you’ll say to me suspiciously, “You mean the end of the movie?”) Yep, that’s what I like best, especially the touching moment that begins with “hello.” (Just before the pit, something so awful happens that I waited and waited for what happens after the pit to occur, praying that it would.)
Best Scene Visually:
There is one brief moment when Mikkelsen is trudging through the snow, and the landscape around him is so vast that he momentarily appears to be walking backwards.
Perhaps the best visual of movie comes when he tries and tries and tries and tries and tries and tries to take the easier path. The visuals are extremely effective here because that path looks so easy, and each new failure appears so catastrophic.
Best Action Sequence:
Based on my repeat mentions of the polar bear, I’m sure that you will not be shocked to learn that I loved the scene when (in absolute terror) he stares down a polar bear and must think of a way to win the fight.
The Negatives:
The ending of the movie is…abrupt (and slightly ambiguous. I’m positive it would leave our sixteen-year-old feeling “triggered” in his own words).
The movie’s biggest weakness can be gleaned from its premise. Make no mistake. This is a film about a guy walking around in the snow. Walking and walking and walking in just snow and snow and snow. And he will die unless he finds help.
Nothing else happens. That’s the whole movie. So if you’re expecting a big Hollywood blockbuster, this is not that film. It’s almost like watching a short story (maybe by Jack London). You are not going to get backstory, gun fights, villains, crazy stunts, unnecessary romance. This is a movie about a man surviving (and trying to save someone else’s life) out in the middle of the Arctic. It’s a drama about a character. Most of the storytelling is visual. Most of the time you will either see Mads Mikkelsen’s anguished, expressive face, or you will see his character walking, trudging, crawling through (or burrowing in) the snow. He also finds stuff, tends wounds, fights a polar bear, and catches fish. That’s it.
Overall:
As long as you’re expecting to see a film with little dialogue about a character played by Mads Mikkelsen trying to survive (almost) on his own in the Arctic, then you should like this movie. The whole time, I kept thinking in paranoia, “If I’m ever visiting a fairly remote place in an airplane or helicopter–or even a car!–then I have a moral responsibility to look around a lot before leaving.” Honestly, that’s something that’s never occurred to me before. What if someone has been just steps away from me desperate for rescue, and I’ve missed them?