Against the Ice
In 1909, two explorers fight to survive after they're left behind while on a Denmark expedition in ice-covered Greenland.
- Released: 2022-02-10
- Runtime: 101 minutes
- Genre: Adventure, Drama, History
- Stars: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Joe Cole, Charles Dance, Heida Reed, Gísli Örn Garðarsson, Sam Redford, Diarmaid Murtagh, Ed Speleers, Frankie Wilson, Nick Jameson, Þorsteinn Bachmann, Árni Þór Lárusson, Haukur M. Hrafnsson
- Director: Peter Flinth
Comments
- kumar_delish - 19 December 2022
Against the all odds.
Captain Ejnar Mikkelsen and Iver Iversen a engineer both brave and great people on this expedition. They both really risk there life's to find out Greenland was just an island. Surviving two years in Artic region is really a toughest matter in the life but both over come all there odds and reach home safely We can't with stand heavy less temperature and high but there over come there fear and stay alive one day they will be rescued from the place Am so happy to watch the movie because ther people behind there findings are honoured they risky there life and made findings or the world giving out there know all over it.
It's really a toughest part of life both done a great job for humanity. - JurijFedorov - 15 July 2022
Not much here at all, skip or watch, doesn't matter
The movie: The movie.
It's very predictable and flat. 2 Danes travel to the Greenland ice in 1910 to find journals, left by an earlier perished Danish expedition, that show that Greenland is one big island so USA has no claim to any of it. Basically, this journey is a bit pointless as just in 10 years the world had technology enough to make this journey much simpler. And in 20 years it would be no bother at all. It's an ealy expedition where 2 men use dog sleds where they kill tired dogs to feed them to healthier dogs. Similar to how Amundsen reached the South Pole. So some historical concepts are fascinating here, but we don't get many of them.
They find the journals, return back to the ship. Now the ship has sunk and the crew made 2 huts out of the ship timber. But the crew is gone as a wailing ship took them along. So the captain, 30 year old Ejnar Mikkelsen, and the young ship mechanic spend 2 winters there until a wailing ship finally finds them somehow. There is not much to the story and there is only so much they can do to make it more interesting. So what did they do?
Firstly, the travel itself takes up maybe 45 minutes? We largely see them from the side or the front which makes the travel more boring than it should have been. We never see where they are going. So instead of being a tension filled race it becomes duller than it should have been. Still, we move along. They find the diaries and return to the ship hut. Then the captain wants to go back after the diaries as they left them behind on the trip home. The captain refuses to leave a note in the cabin as he thinks they will return before the ice unfreezes anyhow. Well, they return having discovered that a ship has been there. Now we just watch them wait it out for 2 years more winters. The captain starts to hallucinate and imagines his girlfriend there. He nearly shoots the mechanic. There is some story about a photo with some Danish women that they both like, but this story goes nowhere. There are also some polar bear stories. Initially one attack where the mechanic kills the bear to save the captain. And another bear finds the hut later on, but doesn't destroy anything and just walks away. So not much happens really. The interesting part is that it really happened. At least the survival part. The bears and hallucination feels a bit off to me. The captain died in 1971 so I assume he has retold the story quite a few times.
I think it overstays its welcome for sure. They could easily cut 30 minutes from it. Very easily. It's still fine enough as it's historical and the landscape is not dull. But we for example never see a single city street or city building. Not a single carriage. No family scenes, no plain work place in Denmark, no apartment or house. It's a very cheap film. A film you can make for a few millions filmed in a few weeks. There is nothing here. I count 15 people on the cast list, but 95% of it is 5 people and 75% of the movie is 2 actors one of which is quite mediocre. That's it. The movie could have been quite a bit better if you replaced 30 minutes of this plot with some scenes set back in Denmark of people worrying about them and maybe even making plans for a life without them. We could also see what happened to them afterwards. We just see a minister greet them and that's it. No street cheering, no public gathering, they don't experience the city life or see what has changed. You could do so much more with so little here. Shame. Surely with CGI and some old sets you could spice this movie up to make it feel historical.
The script also feels a bit lazy. At times it feels modern. They mention stuff that modern men talk about like Titanic or Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition. We see one guy apparently show a middle-finger. The news they talk about is largely just this big historical stuff we still know about today. So no small news about Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, USA. It really feels like a movie written by people who just looked up the very basics about 1910 and called it a day. With a script where 90% of it is dialogue between 2 people you really need to put more work in the script to make it work. Plus, the acting is quite mediocre at best here. It's acceptable, but it's a bit cheap BBC historical TV show type acting. Which is a big shame. The lead actor is Danish. Several actors speak Danish here and they could have made it feel way more real by not having it be in English.
It's like the TV Mini Series Shackleton (2002). We see the very basics from the Endurance survival story. But the book is full of tension and history, and here you see the very basic scenes and of course no great historical stuff as that's endlessly hard to rebuild so there are no cities, towns, cars on the roads or stuff like that. Hence the survival feels like it lacks the final scene where everyone is happy and satisfied at home in a big city. And in this movie we never see initial scenes in the city either so again the characters feel empty. You replicate just the travel on ice and call it a day. It's not something you'd watch if you had better historical movies on your watch list. There are thousands of them, many 100 years old even. These cheap movies with just the bare minimum in acting and plot don't quite cut it even though they are watchable. There is just no theme here. They just survive and then nothing. So you get very little history, very little historical info, and basically no theme. Dull. What's the point? Netflix gets a new movie worth a few millions that many watch because Netflix is empty of movies today? Just something to stare at for a bit?
