TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Jemima It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Kayden This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

donnapri This movie is about a young man driven by hero worship who follows his leader into an adventure that far outstrips his ability to cope. The twist is we experience the story as it would feel like if he were actually telling it to us, if he were trying to communicate with his traumatized and fractured mind. Normally in a first person movie with narration we will see what the metaphorical fly on the wall sees, with clarification from other people's point of view and back story when needed. But there are no flies in Antarctica, not even viruses we learn. No third party witnessed what happened to this group of men, we will get no clarification. It gets weird right away - for example he tells us there was something in the snow, and that his teammates hated him and talked behind his back. There are times we're confused by what he says, we want to say something like, "Did you just say he fell into the ice and was stuck under it!?." Or perhaps we want to ask, "Did you just say that the ghost of his son was in the room, looking down, or was that metaphorical?" The movie does little to clarify, just giving us the feeling of that first jolt when believing the story, believing the misunderstanding. There is no time for questions as this crazy man pushes on and on. Eventually he loses track of the fact he is telling a story, and falls into delusions, thinking he is there, and taking us with him-- the movie portrays this by switching from first to third person. It's difficult to say what actually happened, what has been warped by his personal perspective, and what is complete delusion. I'd recommend questioning everything he wasn't there to see - this is only conjecture on his part and we know he is not in his right mind. I think he actually fell into the hole in the snow. The radio actually stopped working. And there was an actual British journal. He spends a lot of time conjecturing about what happened to the radio - it was sabotaged while I slept, they heard us but couldn't help us, they were looking for us but couldn't find us. This question is eventually answered for us, but not for him. What happened to the guys in the journal, he wrestles with. He tells, probably ruefully, about noticing the British trek seemed to have lost a member, and the reality that someone could die out there was so far from their minds they couldn't even say it out loud. I think what he tells us about the fate of the British Expedition is true. I don't think there is anything supernatural about the journal. Eventually he is way past the point of breaking and his focus narrows to simply reacting to the people around him, especially his leader. I don't think we learn what the leader actually said, or meant - only what we are told from this biased witness. Eventually we get back to where we started. We leave him, shivering on the ice. At this point he is beyond the ability to talk, so the story must end.

fedor8 Six Korean adventurers are on a mission to reach some obscure point in the Antarctic. Why? Because it's there. Look, I never understood it myself, this need to go to the balls-freezing testicles-frosticles poles or to be at "the top of the world". Leo DiCrapio was on top of the world WITHOUT having to climb Everest, right? If that little wimp (sorry, DJANGO tough guy) can do it, then even his Dusseldorf granny can.Several days into the mission, a weird little alien (?) eye peeks out of the food they're eating. A few days later, a big elephant/creature/whatever eye sits in a crevice, staring at the luckless schmuck that fell into it right after attacking the annoying glasses-wearing nerd. (What's a nerd doing on a polar expedition?). Both those scenes are early on in AJ, setting the viewer up for a supernatural horror mystery. Or?Think again. This could have been yet another drama about a man's descent into madness, had they taken out those two scenes, and perhaps one or two others that carry supernatural implications. For some strange reason, AJ (no relation to the putz from that boy band) almost completely neglects the supernatural in the second half, focusing instead solely on the "Captain" and the very obvious fact that he'd lost all of his marbles at some point. Well, at least it should have been obvious – though not to the remaining three team-members. For whatever reasons, they kept following his suicide-mission orders with a minimum of fuss or skepticism until it was (predictably) too late. The act of cutting off the rope holding one of their team-members hanging in the crevice: that alone should have sounded alarm bells in their polar-exploring/snow-loving heads, not to mention his subsequent behaviour (half of which would have been enough to land him in a loony bin for a lengthy period of time). The way that actor plays the Captain - it should have been plain as day that he'd gone insane, and yet these other guys only reach agreement on this piece of bleedin'-obvious trivia once they arrive at the British hut. Perhaps this is a Korean thing, dunno, to be loyal to your superior(s) until the bitter end. That would certainly help explain the almost unique phenomenon of North Koreans not putting up much resistance against one of the harshest tyrannies in human history, whereas that same government would have been brought down a long time ago in any European country – and I mean ANY. (Not even the Russians would have tolerated it.) The way they all follow "Captain" into what is evidently a pointless suicide mission might be therefore more logical, or at least more familiar, to Korean viewers. I am not having a go at Koreans, but merely speculating.It is a pity that the source of Captain's insanity wasn't explored more. Merely suggesting that "Antarctica drove him mad", or that his kid fell from the 14th floor many years ago, is not good enough. The parallels to the fate of the 1922 British expedition, the journal, the hallucinations, and of course the two bizarre eyes: all of these are just much-too-small parts in a much larger puzzle which the movie simply won't allow us to put together, or to at least know where to begin. I don't think that a movie of this kind should either serve us ALL of the answers on a plate as if treating the viewers like a bunch of avatards, nor do I believe that the vagueness should go too far in the other direction. The brilliance of movies that strike a balance – a fine line – between these two extremes cannot be overstated. Clearly, AJ has failed in this. Perhaps it was lazy writing, perhaps it was a lack of ideas how to resolve the movie's grand enigma, or perhaps the writer thought that utter confusion would eventually lead the viewer into some kind of a deep Buddhist trance that would help make all of this comprehensible on some deeper religious or (and I absolutely detest using this word) spiritual (yuck) level.Ultimately, AJ's strengths lie in the beautiful landscapes, the mood, the solid soundtrack, the several fairly memorable scenes, and the sense of mystery. The slow pace will definitely put off avatards and other jamesocameronian riff-raff, but I didn't feel as if there was any tedium. The letdown, as is so often the case, is that the mystery was just a paper-tiger, a parlor trick, a gimmick to keep you interested for the duration. The movie has no real conclusion; it's far too open for interpretation, as open as the pooka of a 59 year-old prostitute, i.e. too vague to make any sense - apart from any subjective drivel that any ambitious/hopeful viewer might very pretentiously/optimistically/deludedly offer as an explanation. Looking forward to reading the other comments here for the usual silly theories!A solid try, but next time more work should go into the script and the basic premise. Perhaps injecting a POINT to everything might help. AJ does not have an open ending – it has NO ending. You can't go off into too many directions within the framework of one single story. Take one direction and run with it. Or walk slowly with it through snow; that works too.

puertoalto Here we have Namgeuk-ilgi or "Artic journal" as it may be better known over here. A movie about an exploration team of 6 Koreans to the depths of the Antarctic, who come across the journals of a British expedition team some 80 years earlier. Fate has it that the mysterious misfortunes of the British are to be befall the Korean team in this forsaken barren wasteland as they struggle to reach their destination "the pole of inaccessibility" (the farthest point from the Arctic coastline).The movie does sound like it could be worth a look, it has a decent cast, we got Ji-tae Yu whose always a solid actor, the movie also starts off promising enough, lending familiar elements from other horror/thriller of similar genres, such as "The Thing". Unfortunately the potential shortly outlives the expectations one would get from this kind of movie. Firstly, one cannot help but feel frustrated by the many "creepy" build ups which lead to nowhere (ie. a tense build up to what the audience perceives should obviously be a "scary" moment, but then that final "scare" part doesn't happen, only the build up). Secondly, the characters are spineless. Personally I find it very irritating in horror movies (unless they are of the humorous kind) when the characters act overly stupid. This movie certainly pushes the boundaries having seemingly brainless idiots in the narrative who cannot think for themselves and simply follow the orders of the so called team "captain" who has quite obviously gone nuts. Even more irritating is that the others agree not to use the "emergency" distress signal even after 2 members have died, because according to the captain it should only be kept for "real emergencies". There are also some discrepancies in regards to realism of this Antarctic trek, though the scenery is shot in a beautiful location, my guess is that real Antarctic is less forgiving and piloting helicopters, in Arctic blizzards to my knowledge among several other things, do not work.In summary this is a very long and extremely frustrating movie which in the end, strays into many confusing paths, none of which lead to a satisfactory ending. If the brainless characters, the narrative suffering from an identity crisis or the slow pace do not put you off, then the 2 hour build-up to a very disappointing ending is sure to finish you off ^-^.

dbborroughs Six men set out to reach the point of inaccessibility in Antarctica. They have 60 days of sun light to travel to the most remote place on the continent by foot, something that has only happened one time before. Along the way they find the journal from a 1922 British expedition that appears to have gone horribly wrong. Soon things begin to mirror the earlier expedition.This is a frustrating film.Beautifully made and breathtakingly shot, with New Zealand doubling for the bottom of the world, this is a film that makes you shiver just from looking at each frame. As polar films go this is one of the best looking ones I've ever seen. The performances are all first rate and you sympathize with the men and their plight.The trouble is that the film's plot doesn't quite work. The mystery of why things go wrong is never fully explained satisfactorily. The film seems to want to blame both the the psychological break down of the men on what happens and at the same time wants to subscribe some form of supernatural explanation. Its possible to to have it both ways with a hint of the supernatural affecting the men, but thats not the case here. (SPOILERS) Here we have the journal which seems to kick off some events that only we see coupling with some things the men experience which are then sort of discounted by the denouncement at the end. Why are we shown hints of monsters that never materialize? I don't have a clue. It reminded me very much of the supernatural war film R-Point which has an ending that seems to come out of left field. In both cases one is left at the end with a film that never delivers on the promise made when the films started. (END SPOILER) Worth a rental or a visit on cable, but this isn't something thats going to be in your need to see repeatedly collection.