Dan Ashley (DanLives1980) It took me two watches to finally come around and give this movie credit where it was due. The first time I didn't see it all and I judged it unfairly as a result. It may not have helped that I saw it on the Horror Channel, which I only flick through out of boredom! It's a well crafted tale reminiscent of The Twilight Zone and with hints of Lovecraft, but also mostly steeped in reality with good use of psychology and paranoia like John Carpenter's The Thing.You can't go wrong with it's cast, notably Ron Perlman, James Le Gros and even Kevin Corrigan and Jamie Harrold, who provide solid backing.The theme is notably environmental horror with a big hint of the paranormal, which you can't tell in the Alaskan wilderness without a couple of natives on board. That theme, when it all mixes up with escalating events proves very atmospheric, and so whether you like the ambiguous ending or not, there's little denying that this slow-thawing chiller does a good job!

Armand not original, not remarkable. only good. a idea who reminds Solaris and many other films about same theme. the only problem is the idea is too generous for artistic team. the scriptwriter, the director are out of a coherent picture about the purpose of film and that fact does the film a strange trip . result - it has not a final and the noble theme about the war between nature and man remains a sketch. sure, it has good parts but only in the first part, as promises. the second has not direction and a huge potential. and that potential is the real problem. because it remains only a tool for the imagination of the public. is it enough ? maybe not. because few actors and a lot of snow are not the fair prize for the patience.

Alex Pickard To be honest I wasn't expecting much going into this film, yet was pleasantly surprised about it for about the first 45mins. As with all isolation movies, there is a profound sense of eeriness, and there are particular things (such as the box from the previous expedition, and a strange log book) which, I thought, were going to be good set ups for more mystery further on in the story. The acting wasn't by any means bad either. Ron Perlman was, well, Ron Perlman, and James Le Gros did fairly well as his opposite. It wasn't even that the characters were unlike-able or underdeveloped.But there certainly is a distinct point in the film where everything well and truly turns on its head. And from there it is all down hill.It actually baffles me completely that a film can go from eerie and interesting, to ridiculous and plain stupid like flipping a light switch. It was like the writers got to a point and said "hmm, we haven't killed many people yet. Probably should drop the storyline and do some character culling." Then proceeded to make completely irrational decisions that left you screaming at the screen in frustration. The biggest flaw in this film is that it never returns to the eeriness it started out with. Instead it decided it needed to go cliché and kill off characters in ways that were baffling. They never circle back to the set ups that they originally established, so leave you thinking 'well, what was the point'. And there is none!I am serious. The end of this movie has absolutely zero relation to the main storyline! And don't even get me started on the final shot. Whoever did that stroke of genius deserves a bullet. Overall my experience of this film went a lot like this: 'Cool. Oh yup. Hmm creepy. Oh yup. Ooo nice! Hmm, interesting. Wait, what? No seriously, what? WHY!? What the f**k. What the hell, just use the dead guys jacket!! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?? ....Are you serious. What,the,f**k. Let me guess, that's it? ...Yup damn. Well that was terrible.'As most people have stated, it was a film that showed serious potential but threw it all away by sticking its head up its own ass. Watch the first 45mins and walk away. At least the questions you have won't be shadowed by the unnecessary questions we are force fed at the end.

Robert J. Maxwell A slapdash combination of monster movie and environmentalist message movie, it has little to recommend it. Al Gore had been giving his popular presentation on global warming for a year or so and was to win an Academy Award for it in 2006, the same year this was released. It looks like a hastily put-together attempt to cash in on legitimate concerns about oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.A team of half a dozen or so, including an environmental scientist, are exploring the drilling possibilities in Northern Alaska. The team is diverse. There's an Inuit woman, a sexy woman, and various other characters led by the gruff and skeptical Ron Perlman.Look out for this spoiler. I feel compelled to add that warning although there's not much doubt that the seasoned viewer will be able to see the ending coming.One by one, something terrible happens to the team members. The first of them, a man, strips naked and walks off into the unending snow fields, after muttering about "something out there" and positing some kind of sour gas (hydrogen sulfide) seeping out of the ground. If he were correct about the gas, everybody would know about it. It has the smell of rotten eggs and turns nickels black. The next bleeds to death from his nose. By this time even Perlman is irritated and calls for help. Alas, the incoming airplane crashes into the base and burns everything up, including the occupants of the airplane and one or two more team members. The Eskimo woman goes nuts and apparently kills another team member, though I was a little confused by this time.The sexy woman, Connie Britton, who has a magnetic face without being the least conventionally beautiful, seems to be the sole survivor. She gives the best performance too. Perlman lapses into the common habit of delivering each use of the F word with emphasis, as if to underline its supposed shock value.All the way through the film, people have been murmuring about things being out there somewhere. Sometimes they glimpse a strange and inexplicable sight for an instant, too short a time to recognize it.What it is, is a herd of the most unlikely looking computer-generated ghoulish quadruped monsters you've ever seen or imagined. With that, any suspense or witchery fades into the white out. It might have been a much better movie if the writers and director had followed Val Lewton's example and left the monsters unseen -- or possibly imaginary -- instead of literal.But then a lot of possibilities are thrown away. This is a bleak and majestic landscape, filmed in Alaska and Iceland, and absolutely nothing is made of its pictorial potential. Imagine what David Lean would have done with such a location.And maybe this is a personal quirk, but I felt some resentment at the cheap attempt to cash in on a serious ecological problem. The issue is of such importance that it deserves better than this politically correct attempt to make money from it.