gian_99 I have watched this movie without having read the book, and I expected something different, more exploring of the Inuit people of Greenland and their story. All of this is only casually spoken of in the movie. It's in the story and in Smilla's words (by the way, this British Smilla isn't really believable as a half Inuit woman). At the end the movie *is* convincing. Maybe a little less culturally involved compared to what I was expecting. It's a nice European action movie with a glimpse of Greenland and her sad story. The ending is often criticized as scarcely believable, but it's OK. I have seen worse, and so have you if you have ever seen any Hollywood action blockbuster. Julia Ormond is good even if I wouldn't believe she has Greenlandic native blood. Richard Harris is perfect as the bad guy.

evening1 This film starts off promisingly with a dazzling display of nature at its most powerful. However, the extreme unlikeliness of the plot makes this movie a bit of a joke.I'll admit that Julia Ormand's performance is strong, and, for me, that Gabriel Bryne can never do any wrong. The premise about an innocent young boy getting killed is genuinely heartbreaking.However, the connection between the asteroid and the rest of this saga isn't clarified until the end, and one must put up with far too much ponderous dialog to make it worth the wait. (Why was it necessary to show repeated spats between Smilla and her stepmother? Who the hell cared?) The Gabriel Byrne character saves Smilla's butt so many times he practically personifies the literary device "deus ex machina." (OK, we get it!)Was this film intended for grown-ups or for the teenage boys who read superhero comics?

tedg This is a replacement comment, the original having been removed because of a complaint.Ordinarily, when there is a book involved, I prefer to judge the movie as independently as I can. But in this case, the movie is so tepid, and the book so alive I cannot avoid it.Toward the end of the film, a bad guy explains that the thing in front of him is not a meteorite. They are cold and dead and this is warm and alive he says. Then the film blows it up. I felt this way about the possibilities of the novel.It was originally written in Danish I think, but the English translation I read was superb. It was fashioned as a thriller/mystery, but the journey was through an inventive inner dialog that abstracted the world of Copenhagen as if it were Inuit, and human love and intrigue as if it were snow. It was not life-altering but striking and extremely well done. In the same way that science fiction can make the world more real by slanting it a bit, this made some female urges and fears more real and accessible to me than usual. I was affected.Inner dialogs in film are hard. Shifting abstractions to a set unfamiliar to the viewer is even harder. Trying to fit squarely in the thriller movie genre makes it impossible. So the failure is easy to understand, at least superficially. But there is something in the way the book moved that could have been captured in film without stretching the vocabulary much.Apart from the clever starting point and narrative perspective, and similarly apart from the conventional ending the amazing thing was how one morphed to the other slowly, continuously, seamlessly and without the reader even noticing. There were some things carried over: the book went from an inner ice to a real ice world. It went from internal mental battles to internal physical battles to simple physical battles. But these were not what was relied on. There was a deliberate evolution of the narrative stance. This is extremely rare, I believe, and it was knowingly controlled. I wish something like this had conveyed in the film.As it is, there is a mystery, then some lovemaking, then the thriller. I'm going to give this a two just based on the book.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

irish23 It's rare that I don't fast-forward through a film these days. This was one film that had me riveted, though, at least for the first 3/4s of the picture. The quiet, tense thriller unfolded with perfect timing and ambiguous characters. The acting was top-notch and the characters multi- dimensional.Then suddenly the film takes a severe detour into "typical action movie." All subtlety is lost, characters become flat, pacing devolves and the whole thing becomes increasingly ridiculous. Enter the fast-forward! It was such a disappointment after that sustained great beginning. Who knows what happened. The end result leaves an unpleasant taste.