Against the Ice

The takeaway from Against the Ice is that not all CGI is bad — which doesn’t necessarily mean that some of it is good, only that some examples are comparatively worse than others. There is a scene in this movie that will remind you of The Revenant, except that the bear in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film is one of its most memorable aspects; as for the one in Against the Ice, let’s just say that I’ve seen more realistic polar bears in those Coca-Cola Christmas ads.

Now, both scenes involve lots of computer generated imagery and a stuntman pretending to be a carnivorous mammal of the Ursidae family, so the difference between awesome and pathetic lies in the performance of the actor being attacked.

Like in pro wrestling, the encounter between Leo DiCaprio and the bear may not have been spontaneous, and its outcome may have been predetermined, but that doesn’t mean the actor didn’t take an actual beating, getting thrown around to and fro like a ragdoll by way of wires; moreover, all of his facial and body language is committed to selling the gravity of the situation, which in turn makes the bear, CGI or not, look like a million bucks. Meanwhile in Against the Ice, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau pretty much just lies there, bringing no urgency to what should be a life-and-death struggle.

This scene is symptomatic of Against the Ice, which is no less a collection of clichés than The Revenant, but whereas the latter amounts to much more than the sum of its parts thanks to superb execution, the former is too conventional to ever transcend its chosen genre.

Consider the way it tracks the passage of time beginning with “Day 1”, which is of course a logical starting point, but also a very obvious one; from there it skips all the way to “Day 26” — my question is, since apparently nothing of note happened in the first 25 days, why not just start with the 26th day and go from there?

All things considered, no one will be surprised to learn that Ejnar Mikkelsen (Coster-Waldau) — on whose book (or, presumably, a translation of the same, seeing as how the Danish characters all speak English as a first language) the movie is based — and Iver Iverson (Joe Cole) “remained friends for life”, but don’t they always? Just like Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush in the King’s Speech, or Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali in Green Book.

All movies “based on a true story” take extreme liberties with their source material, and I usually hate it when they do, but Against the Ice would have been considerably less trite if the makers had gone the opposite route with the characters’ relationship; after all, in the words of Mr. Burns following a similar but by no means as protracted ordeal, “once you've been through something like that with a person, you never want to see that person again.”