Writing a story for a film is a challenge in which the person who thinks of what happens to the main character can make a huge number of choices. As a writer, you want to be unique and not get into clichés. If you make the right choices and then it is also filmed by a competent director, that can result in a great movie. But if you make one wrong choice it can have a lot of impact on a story, sometimes so much that the viewer is no longer prepared to believe in the world that you have built up with great difficulty. Fortunately that was not the case for Arctic … until the last five seconds.
In Artic Overgård (Mads Mikkelsen) crashes at the North Pole with his plane. He is an experienced pilot who knows how to survive in such an uninhabitable place. He follows a tight schedule on a daily basis and ensures that he is visible from the air, catches fish, tries to find out where he is and sends out signals in the hope of being found. However, he must decide after a while whether he will wait or travel through the unpredictable landscape to survive.
This “man against nature” film relies almost entirely on Mikkelsen’s acting. He is fantastic here and knows how to portray a character that I really care about in a film in which there is almost no dialogue. A man who has the urge to survive and has to make extremely difficult choices. Director Joe Penna gives you a great sense of the deserted plains and the feeling of loneliness, where you yourself are actually your biggest enemy. He is also partially responsible for the story and makes a choice at the end of the film (which I will not give away) that bothered me so much that I reduced my score by a point. I understand why he did this and you could even make a point that it can be interpreted in various ways, but it really disappointed me as I left the cinema.
[score7]