tomgib Reviews

Chasing Ice (2012)

Beautifully photographed natural thermometers

[9/10 · 16 February 2013]

As a photographer, James Balog is to me as I am to a cockroach, although I have done a little bit of glacier photography. So it is not surprising that he has worked for National Geographic and has made the movie, "Chasing Ice". I recently traveled some distance to Chicago to see this movie, which contains the most stunning glacier images imaginable.

Early in the movie he wades barefoot into freezing surf full of iceberg chunks to obtain pictures of water breaking over the ice. Right there I was hooked into this movie on the basis of the photography even before we get to shrinking glaciers and what they say about global warming.

The centerpiece is the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), the project he established to provide dramatic documentation of the shrinking glaciers. He and his coworkers placed cameras with automatic timers overlooking glaciers in the far north to take several years of time-lapse pictures of these moving rivers of ice.

He also clambers over difficult, icy surfaces to photograph the melting itself. Rivers of melt-water flow down the glaciers and into gigantic holes, where the ice has been eaten away, providing a path to the bottom. To photograph this, he needs to climb down difficult, dangerous, icy cliffs that would be nearly inaccessible even to someone with two healthy knees, which he does not have.

There are several dramatic scenes showing his tribulations with his nasty knee and balky equipment. They remind us that such struggles are part of the adventure of understanding nature. There is a darkly amusing scene showing his fight just to walk (to get the facts) juxtaposed with the talking heads of the usual gang of global warming deniers (accusing scientists of fakery).

The payoff is the parade of the glaciers, the moving (in more ways than one) images of rivers of ice charging forward while the glacier fronts crumble even faster, eating the glacier from front to back. Other images show glaciers shrinking top to bottom so rapidly that it looks as if they are deflating. My only criticism is that these images went by too fast, hence only a 9 rating instead of 10.

Shrinking glaciers are natural thermometers, which help document the reality of global warming. I hope that the widest possible audience will be able to see this. It is not, nor was it intended to be, a systematic scientific survey. There have been many such surveys showing, for example, that we are not just cherry-picking the glaciers that are losing mass. Balog's intent was to provide the most riveting possible observation, and he has succeeded. Looking at a thermometer will never be the same.

247°F (2011)

A movie to give your head some R and R but with a few problems

[6/10 · 18 November 2012]

This is not really a bad flick, and I can recommend it to anyone whose brain is in a rut and in need of 90 minutes of R and R. It is a lot like the Open Water movies except it involves fire instead of water. Three people are trapped in a sauna in a remote cabin when their friend staggers away, drunk and high, and passes out without realizing that he has left a ladder wedged against the door. There follows various unsuccessful attempts to escape and to call for help. I usually like to guess what people in such a movie will try next, whether some such attempt will eventually work, and whether the attempts and results make any sense. This one did give me something to think about, but I do not think it passed the sense test.

The problem is they have broken a small window for air, not a bad idea. But the window is located near the sensor for the thermostat which interprets the incoming air as too low a temperature. So it cranks the heat up high enough to threaten them with heat stroke. Fooling a thermostat can be a problem. In an office building where I used to work, the thermostat in a naturally cool office once cranked the heat up enough to trip the fire alarm in another office on the same thermostat.

But I think this movie had problems. Why didn't they use the towels that they had to pick up one or more of the hot rocks in the heater and hang or hold it near the temperature sensor? That should have fooled the thermostat in the opposite direction and tended to shut down the heat. I'm not sure what equilibrium temperature the room would have reached, but it should have been a lot cooler with the heater shut down most of the time. Also I don't think it likely that incoming air would have cooled the sensor without reaching the rest of the room. In fact, it seems more likely that heat would have escaped through that broken window.

But this flick had compensations. Friends making such an earnest effort to understand, survive, and escape trouble can make a movie interesting. One character, Jenna, had been trapped before and was fighting the after effects while her friend, Renee, seemed at first to have it together. As the situation progresses, they switch roles as Renee comes apart while Jenna tries to get it together. Such things are hardly new in movies, but they can raise the interest level, and it was nicely done here. Also I am getting tired of movies (and here comes a major spoiler) that seem to exist just to gradually kill off the whole cast, one by one. This was a nice exception as it threatened that sort of ending right up to very late in the movie, when we find that …… well, you get the idea.

The Happening (2008)

Either outsmart the inexplicable or die. That's OK - in a movie.

[7/10 · 18 June 2008]

In "The Happening", we see an intense effort either to survive by outsmarting the inexplicable or to face the end with dignity. I found it appealing.

I liked Mark Wahlberg's science teacher and how he handled his class. The trick he played on one student might get him into trouble in today's hypersensitive world, but such theatrics must be tempting to many teachers. If everyone could teach like that, our test scores would be great.

I liked the struggle for an explanation. Not that I agreed with the movie's take on evolution, but when you are in a desperate run for your life from such an unknowable threat, you might improvise a bit. Wahlberg's character, the TV talking heads, and John Leguizamo's math teacher were all out of their depth, and they were all probably wrong about what was happening. But at least their theories fit the facts before them. The "force of nature", whatever it was, clearly affected smaller groups as time went on, and realizing that fact saved at least some of the characters.

I liked how Zooey Deschanel conveyed terror without surrender at least until there seemed to be good reason for surrender without terror. From the promotional clips, I was afraid that she was stuck with one of those old female characters whose only role was to just stand there. I was prepared to hate that, because her characters are usually strong people who can deal with life and convey their turmoil without the standard kicking and screaming.

However, her character did deal with life and taught us something valuable. The first shot of her face, a quietly expressive one, shows understanding of the scale of the danger if not the cause. Eventually, as a painful ending becomes likely, she shows how you can face this as long as you fulfill your responsibilities – in her case to atone for her contemplated transgression and also to the young girl in her care.

I was actually disappointed that the ending was so bland. There was no good reason for the movie to stick with the explanation as understood by the characters, who were making the best of very limited information. The danger they perceived could probably be overcome medically, and the movie needed to end by finding some new level of revolt by nature. Now I am stuck with trying to create my own ending, but maybe that is part of the fun.

War of the Worlds (2005)

An anti-Close Encounters but something good here anyway

[6/10 · 5 December 2005]

In Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", he gave us aliens who arrived in spacecraft covered with clouds. They stabbed the night with blinding spotlights, communicated in tones, and hovered over Devil's Tower. Awestruck earthlings contemplated the arriving ships while bathed in heavenly, alien light just before the aliens emerged and turned out to be nice. It was a transition from a universe full of horror to a benign one.

"Independence Day" overturned that universe when it gave us aliens who arrived in clouds and hovered over buildings that seemed to vaguely resemble Devil's Tower. After a few scenes of awestruck people bathed in heavenly light, the aliens blew the daylights out of all of them. Since I never got over that sacrilege against Spielberg, I was prepared to hate his "War of the Worlds" in which he committed the same sacrilege against himself.

I should have become ill when the aliens in "Worlds" arrived in clouds, occasionally stabbed the ground with blinding spotlights, and communicated in tones all in the service of a genocidal war against humanity. But the film won me over when I realized that it is primarily about the horrors of becoming a refugee from such a merciless foe. It is no "Grave of the Fireflies", that gut churning Japanese film about the aftermath of the fire bombing, but it does poke into the territory.

We see how refugees will protect their families and sometimes help others but also sometimes sacrifice others for their own safety. They make stupid decisions out of ignorance and even kill to avoid danger. The theme is true to the novel, because H.G, Wells wanted "War of the Worlds" to show what it was like for primitive people to be overrun by advanced weaponry that they could barely understand. He expressed this by writing early on that the Tasmanians were entirely swept out of existence by European immigrants and asking "are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?" Now that weaponry is more advanced than ever and sometimes used as ruthlessly as ever, the theme is timelier than ever.

Spielberg's film makes us inhabit the minds of one family and experience their terror as they flee the mounting atrocities. Because it grabs us with the emotion of their danger, it is a good movie. However, it is not a great one because it missed too many chances to drive home what "Worlds" is supposed to be about. Wells' book contains the above quote; the movie does not. Although it has been criticized for various logical flaws (how did that kid survive the big fireball, anyway?), its main problem is in not following its theme through to the end. "Fireflies" was mainly about hunger after someone destroys a society; "Worlds" barely touches hunger. Probably Spielberg thought he was making a movie to warn us about terrorism rather than the one I saw.

But it grabbed me anyway, and many of the logical criticisms can be avoided. The camera might have been shielded from the EMP behind some cars. I suppose the machines rose from an impossible million-year underground hideout to exploit our fear of sleeper cells. But how, in the movie itself, do we know they were there that long? We have only the word of half-crazed people, and they had no way of knowing anyway. We saw the machines rise but not how or when they were buried. Part of the horror is that one day life goes on, and another day brings unexplained terror. People on the run would probably concoct explanations by the bucketful.

Where could the machines have come from? Maybe all the lightning was a Star Trek-like transporter that beamed them in only moments before they arose. The ground could have provided protection for powering them up and raising the shields.

The final family reunion does break the spell, but after all, Wells ended his book with one and the film would not do much business otherwise. I am, at least, not surprised that the aliens missed the microbes. They were probably so obsessed with their invasion, that they even thought that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.