Movie Review - Arctic

Joe Penna is a YouTube star from Brazil. He started posting videos online in 2006 as a teenager. A lot of his videos revolve around him making music. His instrument of choice is his guitar. His videos started getting attention from radio and TV news outlets. Major corporations started taking notice. Within five years, he was one of the most subscribed and popular, YouTube stars in Brazil and around the world. He started working with American musicians and even started producing commercials for American companies. He's made music videos and short films. This film represents his feature debut, which he began making at only the age of 30.

Mads Mikkelsen (Doctor Strange and Casino Royale) stars as Overgård, a man who survived a plane crash in the arctic region. The specific country is never fully identified, but he's stranded in a frozen, snow-capped space. We never see the plane crash. The film starts with Overgård having already figured out a routine to keep himself alive. The hull of the plane is still intact and he uses it for shelter. He's also found a way for ice fishing. Presumably, he crashed near a frozen lake or stream, the bottom of which still has living fish. It's a rather convenient contrivance, but it's supposed to underscore his survival skills or sheer ingenuity.

A part of his routine includes walking to an elevated or higher point from the plane and setting up what is possibly a radar. He's able to power it using a hand-crank. It doesn't appear to hold a charge or have a battery. If so, that battery is dead. Therefore, everyday, he has to hike to this elevated or higher point and crank this machine that beeps and shines a green light if an aircraft is approaching. We see many scenes of him doing this, but the machine only shines a red light, meaning nothing is approaching. These many scenes indicate that Overgård has been out here for many days, if not weeks.

Maria Thelma Smáradóttir co-stars as an unnamed woman who also is stranded out there with Overgård, but she was more severely injured. Overgård has to treat her injuries as best he can. The reason we never learn the woman's name is because she doesn't speak the same language as Overgård who speaks both Danish and English. She can understand him a little, but she keeps slipping in and out of consciousness. She's alive but practically comatose for this entire film. She's not much more than a damsel in distress with no agency or interaction in this story.

This film is in a long line of survival films, pitting man against nature. One such film that was released recently, last summer in fact by a filmmaker from the same area as the making of this film, was Baltasar Kormákur's Adrift (2018). That film also had two people stranded with one of the two being incapacitated, near comatose and totally reliant on the other for survival. Kormákur's film though gives the incapacitated person some input and some dialogue other than just being a female prop.

Two years ago, a similar survival film to this one was released. Hany Abu-Assad's The Mountain Between Us also had two people stranded on a snow-capped mountain side after surviving a plane crash. It starred Idris Elba and Kate Winslet. Elba had the same role as Mikkelsen and Winslet had almost the same role as Smáradóttir but Winslet got to speak. She got to have agency and even some action on her own. Abu-Assad's film was more a romance and kind of fantasy, but the dynamic here merely underscores traditional gender roles that are in general reductive toward women.

Overgård has to decide on whether to stay at his makeshift camp near his damaged plane or attempt to hike toward where he thinks he can find rescue. He's figured that the trek would take many, many miles or kilometers and could take days, not accounting for various dangers, given that he has to pull an unconscious woman on a sled for the entire trip. The film never really lays down his impetus to go on the trip or if he really wrestles with the idea, as opposed to keep doing what he's been doing.

Penna's film at that point wants to become a snowy walk version of All is Lost (2013), another survival film. It works well enough in that regard. It's a different thing though because when a plane crashes or even a helicopter crashes, usually there's a flight plan to account for aircraft in case of such events. Even though flight plans aren't always required by law, it seems odd that one wouldn't be filed. If a plane goes down over water, that makes search-and-rescue more difficult. A similar difficulty would arise in this region, but without specifics or context as to Overgård's crash, it makes his situation difficult to judge. Abu-Assad's film didn't have that issue because it was put into the dialogue.

One nitpick is the bathroom situation. I know it's a movie and we're meant not to think about that stuff, but when a film focuses so much on details of survival, it's odd that it wouldn't acknowledge the basic of human needs, the movement of the bowels. The film puts so much on him finding food and being able to eat. This means that he must need some kind of toilet. This would also be true for the woman involved here. I'm always more appreciative of films that acknowledge this when people are put in extreme situations where they might be cut off or not have a toilet readily available. The Mountain Between Us didn't address this issue, but again that film was more a romantic drama than sheer survival film.

Rated PG-13 for language and some bloody images.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 38 mins.

Available on DVD and VOD.