Whiteout

Upon arriving back in Colorado, I was way behind on my movieseeing, as I've mentioned. At first I had a real gung-ho mentality about catching up. I made a detailed list of all the movies that I needed to see ASAP, and constructed a battle plan for seeing them in Fort Collins and throughout the Denver metro area.

But what I didn't count on was how tuckered out I'd be from all that travelling, and for the first two weeks, I barely felt like leaving the house much at all. A trip down to Denver suddenly seemed like a major venture.

So I've kept straggling along, playing rear guard action, seeing the movies before they leave. This results is the old familiar Thursday scramble, of trying to see movies on the last day before they get shipped out in those big octagonal metal containers that contain the prints.

At the same time, I wanted to go down to Westminster to see my sister and her kids. They'd come up to Fort Collins on my birthday a few days after I got back, but it seemed like for a sense of completeness, I would need to visit them soon, since my trip westward had begun at their former residence in Groton, Massachusetts. They had left about the same time I had, and had reached Colorado in three days. I had taken two months to get hear. The official end of the this leg of the trip demanded a visit. Besides, I just love my nieces.

So I emailed my sister and arranged for a visit last Thursday that would also serve to cross a few last-day-in-the-theater movies off my list. It would also be the first Denver-area dent in my "Radius Project" to see movies in all the theaters within a 100-mile radius of Fort Collins.

I had it all planned it, and thankfully it worked well. I left at 11 am in time to drive down I-25 to just north of Denver, then headed west on the freeway towards the foothills, exiting at the Colorado Mills Mall just on the edge of Golden. My goal was the UA Colorado Mills 12 there.

Actually there are two UA cineplexes there, one right across the road from each other, and I went to the wrong one first, because it wasn't very well marked. I went inside to get directions to the right one.

I turns out the Colorado Mills Mall is a brand new "lifestyle center" kind of place. It's a mall with a central street, like a Main Street, that is narrow with parallel parking, in imitation of a real downtown. The UA multiplex, shining and new, was on the "Main Street" of the Mall. I was both impressed and repulsed. I like the effort of these places, but Jane Jacobs long ago pointed out that real downtowns require buildings with a mix of ages and rents, in order to incubate the kind of economic activity that feels right and real. But like I said, I appreciate the effort. In 100 years, it might be a really cool place to hang out. You have to plant seeds for the future, after all. Besides, I was really there to see a movie.

Whiteout had come out in September, but it hadn't stuck around in theaters very long. The Colorado Mills was absolutely the last place in Colorado where it was showing. It was now or never.

From the trailers, I knew the premise: a horror movie set in Antarctica. Or at least I thought I knew the premise. It turns out it was not a horror movie at all, but rather a suspense movie.

Indeed the movie is set at the South Pole. In the opening few minutes, I began to wonder what I was in for, because the South Pole research station is a fantasy that looks absolutely nothing like the real Amundsen-Scott Station. And for good reason. The base depicted in the movie would be more suitable to the tropics than the South Pole. No way such architecture would make sense, with the buildings up on stilts in order to receive the maximum brunt of the cold winds. Yes, it's just a movie, when a movie violates some of the basic common sense ideas of how things are supposed to be built, it starts to lose credibility with me right off the bat.

Yeah, you've got to suspend a bit of credibility to enjoy this at all, to be sure. The most laughable moment occurred in the last act of the story, when a storm is supposedly bearing down on the South Pole, one that will shut down all travel off the base, and thus serves as the necessary "ticking clock" to accelerate the action and increase the tension.

A storm? Sure. No problem. But on the radar screen that keeps popping up, the storm is obviously a freaking hurricane, a tropical storm with a defined eye. It wouldn't have been such a bad error, but they kept showing it over and over. Like I said, you have to let go of some reality in order to enjoy this movie at all.

Actually I thought I was going to like this movie. Despite the absurdities mentioned, I enjoyed how the tension was set up. Why are people being murdered in Antarctica? Kate Beckinsale is a federal agent assigned there (we learn why in flashbacks), and it is her duty to find out whodunnit, even if that means missing the last flight out. That's a pretty good detective premise, all in all. Nice original concept. I was rooting for this movie to succeed.

I was rooting for it all the way up to the climax, when we finally learn the solution to they mystery of why people are being murdered. Of course it involvesa Maguffin in the form of metal cylinders. But what do they contain that people will kill for?

Cripes. It all just fizzles out. The solution was a huge let down, one of the least interesting ways that the story could have been resolved. Looking back, the set up to the solution was barely meaningful at all, foreshadowed briefly in an early scene involving a gift that Beckinsale's boss gives to her. But that was it. It was a such a disappointment. It was almost like "spin the dial and see what resolution to tack on to this." There was nothing that really felt satisfying about the conclusion at all.

At that point, the weight of the previously mentioned absurdities hit home. Why am I bothering to watch this movie? Half way through, I wondered why it had done so poorly. By the end, I knew why.

A couple other things about this movie: first off, there is a medical doctor at the base. When I saw him, I thought, "Wow that looks like a much older version of Tom Skerrit." Turns out that Tom Skerrit just looks really, really old now.

The other thing that really stuck out to me was the inclusion of sneaked-in globalism themes, in the form of predictive programming that is showing us the way towards World Goverment. This took the form of a "United Nations Detective," who enters the scene as a rival to Beckinsale's U.S. Marshall character. Turns out that according to the movie, the UN Detective outranks a federal marshall, at least at the South Pole. I nearly threw up. World goverment, here we come! Just tell me the global carbon taxes I owe to the World Bank, and where I can send the check!