In 1909, two Danish explorers are left behind in frozen Greenland. Based on a true story, director Peter Flinth’s Against the Ice has all the beats we’ve come to expect from docudrama adventures including marauding polar bears and loves left behind. It doesn’t have a compelling presentation, however, for if the purpose is to show us how tedious waiting for rescue can be, it is successful.
In fact, the polar bears are the best thing about it, and they hang around not enough. Their two sequences do not make the film memorable (not in the way the bear in Revenant occupies a chunk of the film and its tension). While you get a sense of their enormous size, you also realize their hunger in this barren land is similar to the human’s survival instincts. Nobody wins in this lonely place.
The best suspense is wondering how fuel for the burner and the food supply could last for the over three years they await rescue. Dream sequences about lovely ladies are not enough to give the film the romantic boost it needs.
The landscape is just as forbidding as you would expect, and the acting low-key method-like. Einar Mikkelsen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), the captain of the operation, is determined to show that his predecessor found no strait to make that patch of land an island, foreclosing the US’s interest in claiming it.
Iver Iversen (Joe Cole) is the greenhorn mechanic who volunteered for the two-man rescue and recon. Neither man is loquacious, so the boredom of their time together is accentuated by no heavy lifting in the script.
Greenland is starkly beautiful, and the story is spare. Netflix owns the property.
