What was that? I still don’t know… it was not “The Thing”, even though the setting and setup of characters has to ring that bell. It was not “The Day After Tomorrow”, even though there is a not so subtle undertone of all the bad things happening being self-inflicted by a ruthless earth population trying to rip even the latest bits of organic life out of the Earth’s already tortured body. It is a bit of those, and then again, it turns out to be a thriller-like film about some guys losing their minds after being locked up under high pressure in an Alaskan research and test drilling site. Or maybe they do not lose their mind, but there is something out there that seeks revenge? The film leaves this open up until a certain point, and I would have preferred if it had stayed on this level of ambiguity. As the director seems to decide towards the end which way he leans, the whole setting became more ordinary and less interesting to me. All in all, it is a film with a fragile dramatic arc anyway, I had my moments when I was wondering whether the not very long playing time was a misprint and it was actually much longer. No, only felt like that at points, because not too much is happening, and the increase in tension is not always successful.
Still, snow and arctic stations usually are a combination, and Ron Perlman is in it, so there is no way of failing completely.
thomas4cinema 