Against the Ice

2022 - 3 - 2

Post cover — Image courtesy of "Roger Ebert"

Against the Ice movie review & film summary (2022) | Roger Ebert (Roger Ebert)

Warning: at least two sled dogs die about a half hour into the delightfully pulpy Icelandic-Danish survival adventure “Against the Ice.

Days pass in a sobering and clearly-delineated flurry of intertitles (ex: “DAY 132”) and eventually you start to anticipate mirage-like phantoms, like hot air balloons and stranded automobiles, as much as gonzo dialogue, like the above-mentioned cannibal talk. Dance makes a meal of the word “lieutenant” and also gives very good monologue, as when he describes an explorer’s “single most important task.” Obviously “blood, sweat, and tears” are involved. As a screenwriter, Coster-Waldau (and Derrick) packs every scene with the sort of lurid and surprising details that are sure to delight fans of airport paperbacks and/or B-movie suspense. To be fair, “Against the Ice” features some tense and well-paced set pieces, as well as some handsome, atmospheric outdoor photography (lensed by Danish cinematographer Torben Forsberg), some of which was shot in Greenland. Cole and Coster-Waldau are also both terrific in their respective roles, even if they’re not the real stars of the movie. That prized document suggests, in no uncertain terms, that Danish explorers, and not the American adventurer Robert Peary, had already discovered Greenland’s Northern-most border, which in turn suggests that the US “has no claim” in the Arctic, as Mikkelsen explains to Iversen. Warning: at least two sled dogs die about a half hour into the delightfully pulpy Icelandic-Danish survival adventure “Against the Ice.” I wouldn’t put it past the movie’s creators, particularly star/producer/co-writer Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister on “Game of Thrones”), to have killed more dogs off-screen in either a deleted or an unfilmed scene.

Someone Gets Ravaged by a Polar Bear and Against the Ice Is Still ... (Paste Magazine)

This excursion saw prolific Danish explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen and his crew on a quest to recover diaries left behind by members of the failed Mylius-Erichsen ...

Perhaps some of this has to do with the fact that the film’s framework is somewhat confusing. The fact that the film stars primarily English actors, too, despite being based on a story that is incredibly geographically and culturally specific, certainly doesn’t do it any favors. When the first hurdle finally arrives—Iver’s dogsled tumbles off of a cliff and he has a mere fraction of a second to salvage both his and Ejnar’s food, and one of their dogs—the lackadaisical filmmaking turns it into a moment that feels largely inconsequential. We’ve got the underdog who is bound to make a plethora of hazardous mistakes, alongside a weathered explorer with a fierce “whatever-it-takes” mindset. Against the Ice boasts a remarkably promising set-up, which teases a captivating Arctic flick on par with Joe Carnahan’s nail-biting, Liam Neeson-centric The Grey. In the first scene, a man returns to the remote Alabama basecamp, disheartened and exhausted from a failed journey to retrieve the journals from the previous expedition. At times, Mikkelsen’s story is almost too fantastical to believe: From poisonings to sled-dogs hanging off of cliffs by ropes to a polar plunge with a polar bear, the explorer came up against just about every obstacle you could possibly think of.

'Against the Ice' Review: Snow Buddies (The New York Times)

A hard-core first half is deflated by sleepy melodrama and a formulaic script in this adventure film about the Danish explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen.

The saintly younger man, however, puts up with his captain when he experiences visions of his girlfriend, and Flinth confusingly skips past swaths of time to cram in more moments of brotherly friction. Dog lovers beware: In one scene, a fazed Iversen must sacrifice one of the pups to provide food for the rest. Dashing patriot that he is, Mikkelsen refuses to abandon the cause, though none of his men care to join him aside from Iver Iversen (Joe Cole), a chipper volunteer who doesn’t know what he’s in for.

Stream It Or Skip It: 'Against the Ice' on Netflix, a Survival Story About ... (Decider)

The Gist: Ejnar Mikkelsen (Coster-Waldau) clods back to the ice-locked vessel Alabama with Jorgensen (Gisli Orn Gardarsson) stretched out on the dogsled.

There’s nothing unexpected out there for Ejnar and Iver to run into – just wind, wind, wind, a polar bear, wind, more wind and even more wind followed by wwwwinnndd, and the polar bear scenes stir up more unintended laughter than a sense of peril. For Ejnar and Iver, the days plod on uber-dramatically or uber-undramatically, and there isn’t a whole lot of meat on their bones personality-wise; they talk vaguely about missing women but otherwise don’t reveal much about themselves besides a Iver’s slightly unexpected durability and Ejnar’s slightly unexpected irrationality. It’s the type of journey where you will have to kill one of the dogs to feed the other dogs. It’s his patriotic duty to go back for it, but considering Jorgensen’s fate, he has no takers for a partner – except Iver Iverson (Joe Cole), a greenhorn who’s never earned his stripes as a selfless explorer who might also have to be a complete moron to embark on a grueling months-long expedition for the sake of the accuracy of some lines on a map. Ejnar is the Alabama’s captain, and he and his crew are on a rescue mission. He found the explorers’ bodies, but not their data, which, per adventurer protocol, is stuck in a pile of rocks somewhere on a sheet of ice.

Against The Ice Review (Game Rant)

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau co-wrote and stars in this beautifully shot, well-performed, historical survival drama that serves its purpose well.

Against the Ice inhabits the middle of the spectrum, better than many and worse than others. Aspects of the storytelling feel inspired by pulp novels, and the film's version of planting and payoff is a bit elementary. It was filmed on location in Greenland and Iceland, and that commitment to the setting makes a lot of it a treat to look at. The frustrating thing about discussing Against the Ice is that it's extremely well put together, and many people clearly put in an immense amount of work to get it made, but there just isn't much there. The tale is adapted for the screen by Joe Derrick and Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who also portrays Mikkelsen, and is directed by Peter Flinth. Retelling the story with a level of grounded accuracy has been a time-honored tradition in film, but not every story makes the jump perfectly.

'Against the Ice' Review: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau Stars in a Tedious ... (IndieWire)

In that respect, Flinth's expedition proves even less fruitful than Iver and Mikkelsen's. Forget “The Terror,” here comes “The Tedium.” Popular on IndieWire.

Coupled with an escalating series of very silly dream sequences (and one encounter with a CGI polar bear so fake-looking it seems like it’s supposed to be unreal), Flinth’s approach can’t help but feel counterintuitively erratic for a film about two men stuck in the same place for so long. Coster-Waldau and Joe Derrick’s script smartly underplays the whole “hardass father figure gets his heart softened by guileless kid” dynamic (knowing full well that the survivalism of the movie’s second half won’t allow for such broad sentimentality), but “Against the Ice” struggles for something to replace it. They’ve been moored on the good ship Alabama for too long already, and the purpose of their voyage — to disprove the United States’ assertion that Northeast Greenland is geographically separate from the rest of the country, and therefore not Danish territory — doesn’t seem worth dying for. The specifics of that approach, however, are mighty hard to pin down, as “Against the Ice” doesn’t weather the agony of being stuck in a frozen hellscape for three years so much as it drifts through the snow in search of a more interesting (or Netflix-friendly) way of telling this story. If this all sounds like it has — or at least should have — the makings of a brutal, “The Revenant”-esque saga about men vs. The situation later becomes so grim that Iver begins to shoot the weakest dogs and feed their meat to the stronger ones, who will soon be eaten themselves.

The harrowing true story behind Netflix survival thriller Against the ... (The Irish Sun)

Against the Ice is based in 1909 and follows Ejnar Mikkelsen (Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Iver Iversen (Joe Cole) on their expedition in ...

They’re so strong. They’re so powerful. - Thebest thrillersto watch on Netflix right now - Thebest comediesto watch on Netflix right now - Thebest documentariesto watch on Netflix right now - Thebest seriesto watch on Netflix