Arctic

First Hit: This film keeps the audience engaged, although there are only about 30 speaking lines in the whole thing.

There are just a handful of movies where the actor can carry the film by themselves. It’s difficult to keep the intense drama high enough while retaining the audience’s engagement. One film that achieved this was 2013’s All is Lost with Robert Redford. In that film, he’s sailing on a boat that crashes into an errant cargo container and tries to stay alive in a sinking ship. He’s the only one in the film.

In Arctic the film opens with Overgard (Mads Mikkelsen) scraping snow away from a large SOS signal he’s made in the snow. He then checks a rig he’s prepared to catch fish through holes in the ice. He goes back to his crashed airplane. At a particular time, he gets up and goes out to a snow hill and turns a crank on a box that sends out a distress signal. After so many turns (we hear him mutter a count), he packs up the machine and heads back to the protection of the fuselage.

We don’t know how long he’s been out here, but it must be quite a while because the plane is deteriorating.

He’s very regimented because of the way he does the same schedule each day. One of the things he does each day is clean a small pile of rocks. We find out only later what this represents.

One day, just as he finishes cranking the signal device, the green light goes on, meaning someone has gotten the signal. Then a helicopter appears. However, the high wind starts tossing the aircraft around, and as it starts to fade from view, it crashes. Overgard’s hopes of being rescued are dashed.

Going to the wreckage he finds the pilot dead, and a young woman (Maria Thelma Smaradottir) injured but alive. Watching him work to help this woman is a study in kindness, thoughtfulness, and selflessness.

Although he discovers that she doesn’t speak English, he finds a way to get her to squeeze his hand, letting him know that she’s alive and her current level of her strength.

Throughout the rest of the film, she murmurs about ten unintelligible words, at most, and the rest of the dialogue is him asking her to squeeze his hand and telling her it will be “OK.” Because he found a map of the area in the helicopter wreckage, and that the young woman is not getting any better, he decides to try to move them to an outpost that’s identified on the map.

Fighting off a polar bear, the intense elements, steep crevasses, and caverns, he makes his way towards the outpost pulling the young woman behind him.

The scenes are shot so well that I felt just as cold as they were sitting in my warm cosy seat. The intensity of the weather and the patient way Overgard stayed focused to his task was unbelievable.

Mikkelsen was amazing. His clarity of staying alive surpassed anything I think I could have dredged up from within. I believed every step of this journey. Joe Penna and Ryan Morrison wrote a fantastic screenplay. Penna must have put himself and the crew through incredible hardships to be able to film this story.

Overall: I was enthralled every step of this journey.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

First Hit:  Could not get into the story nor did I think it was well thought out.

A franchise series of films is always challenging. Even one of the best, Star Wars, has had some clunkers or at least clunker moments; think Jar Jar Binks in “Episode I – The Phantom Menace”. Where does this film fit with the series? My guess is that it probably fits after “Episode III:  Revenge of the Sith” and “Episode IV:  A New Hope”.

Was this film needed to make the series whole? Probably not, but it was a way for Disney to make it a key component in the series as this tells the bit about the Princess Leia (Ingvild Deila) and the Rebel Alliance getting the plans to Death Star. As we know in later episodes Leia implanted these plans into R2-D2.

Although this was an OK idea, the film fell apart in one of the later opening scenes where Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), his wife Lyra (Valene Kane), and their child Jyn (Dolly Gadsdon – youngest, Beau Gadsdon – young, and Felicity Jones - adult) were found by agents of the Empire hiding on a small deserted planet Lah’mu.

I do not know how, but during the dialogue between Galen and Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) about their involvement with the design and use of the Death Star, I lost interest. Maybe it was the convoluted opening, the rip off use of the opening for the first Star Wars film or maybe it was simply not interesting enough.

My hope picked up again when Saw Gerrera (Forrest Whitaker) finds young Jyn and takes her to safety. Here I thought, OK with Whitaker we'll get some meat into this storyline, but again this fell short. I've always been able to count on Whitaker to make something better, but his role wasn't critical and I fell back into unengaged and uninterested in what was taking place on the screen.

The story leaps in time to find Jyn (now played by Jones) being an important and, at times, a despised member of the Alliance because her father's role in completing work on the Death Star. Her status as leader or rebel of substance happens, not by anything she does, but because her father sends her a message, through a hologram, that he’s made a back-door flaw in the Death Star which the Alliance can use to destroy it.

By this time the audience is treated to an elongated battle which is poorly choreographed. There are some nice CG effects, but the acting, storyline and dependence on battle scenes to create action and interest weighed this film down.

Jones does not have the chops to make a believable rebel character or leader. There is a lack of innate strength of spirit which her acting cannot overcome that makes her a weak link in this film. Whitaker is wasted in this role as a wise elder warrior for the Alliance. Mikkelsen is good as Galen, but the role is limited by the script. Diego Luna (playing Cassian Ando Rebel Intelligence Officer) gave it his best, but the script and story didn’t have this character develop. His big turning point moment is when he’s supposed to kill Galen (unknown to Jyn); what does he choose? Donnie Wen (as Chirrut Imwe) playing a blind Jedi wanna-be was OK and provided some amusing moments. Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy wrote a weak script and the lack of direction, thereby creating an uninteresting film with characters we don't care about, falls on Gareth Edwards.

Overall:  This film feels like a throwaway created for money because all the main characters die, their story ends, and it filled a small gap in the Star Wars saga sequence.