‘Against the Ice’ Review: A Good-Looking but Glacial Trudge Through a Snowbound True Story
variety.comJessica Kiang Take one glance at the spectacular landscapes of Greenland and you understand why in Inuit the word for snow has so many variations and derivations.
The aerial establishing shot that opens Peter Flinth’s “Against the Ice” alone challenges the descriptive powers of the English language; inhabiting such an environment continually, you would have to find new exotic coinages to communicate the sheer variety of textures that freezing water can exhibit.
Such creative imagination, however is sorely lacking from Flinth’s handsome but plodding adventure movie. To reduce a titanic struggle for survival in one of the most inhospitable climes on earth to such by-the-numbers drama is in many ways akin to standing on a jagged frozen peak, gazing across blizzard-assailed permafrost plains to crumbling white cliffs and ice shelfs beyond and thinking “Snow.” This Netflix movie — and it feels oddly precision-tooled as a “Netflix movie” — is adapted by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Joe Derrick from the book “Two Against the Ice” by Danish explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen, which detailed Mikkelsen’s 1909-12 expedition to Greenland.
Starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Joe Cole and the snow in Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s beard, the film faithfully recounts the many perils that Mikkelsen (Coster-Waldau) and sidekick Iver Iverson (Cole) faced in their attempt to retrieve the findings of an ill-fated previous expedition.
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