A 6 -man Korean expedition team are trying to reach the ‘Pole Of Inaccessibility’ which is in a remote part of Antarctica. Only one other team (a Russian one) has ever reached the place. The team have a couple of months of daylight to try and reach the location before darkness falls across the land for 6 months. Things start to go wrong from the beginning with various mishaps with communications and bad weather hampering them and the team leader isn’t that stable in his mind. An old tattered black flag is found and hidden close by in the snow is a journal which belonged to a British expedition from 80 years ago. The journal recounts the things that happened to them during their mission and the same events seem to be happening to the Korean team now. As tensions mount between members of the team with some thinking they should turn back, the slightly deranged team leader insists they should plod on to their target. He is so determined to reach the P.O.I he sabotages the only communication link they have with their base camp. Will the team ever reach what they set out to do or will illness and the hidden dangers in the harsh environment they’re trekking in finish them off?
I thought that this movie was going to be one of these supernatural thrillers in which the story is moved into the wilderness of Antarctica rather than the usual locations we’re used to but it turned out to be more of a psychological horror in the end. There’s plenty of promise during the first 30 mins with some hints given that something unearthly or supernatural may be following the team with even a ghostly hand jutting up from the snow which turns up on videotape but all of this is dropped as the more psychological aspect of the plot comes to the fore . You just know after discovering the journal from the ill-fated 1922 British expedition that the Korean team are doomed to fail as they soon make the same mistakes and then things get worse when two of the members disappear. The first hour of the movie is fairly mundane and just shows the growing tension between the team members as they trudge across the ice and have arguments. Although things improve a little bit in the second half I’m sure if the first hour hasn’t perked the viewer’s interest I think the majority will have switched off and to be honest I wouldn’t blame anybody if they did.
The story focuses mostly on one character – the team leader. A veteran of various expeditions, he is haunted by his son who fell to his death and he is slowly becoming insane. Driven by a need to reach the target destination, he doesn’t seem to care for the wellbeing of his team. It is never explained fully if it’s the visions he is seeing that is making him mad or the reason why he has to complete the mission? Even though you might think that the team leader is the villain of the movie, the truth is there’s nobody amongst the characters you can sympathise with so you don’t really care for anybody’s fate by the end. It doesn’t help that there’s hardly any character development taking place and that some red herrings are put in the movie but if you don’t try and explain even just a tiny bit of what’s going on it’ll just confuse the viewer and that’s what it did with me anyway. The source of the leader’s insanity should have been explored more. Was there a supernatural explanation as to why all of the team suffered mental breakdowns – again the viewer never knows.
The cinematography though is fantastic and is the highlight of the entire movie. New Zealand doubles up as the Antarctic and the snowy landscape is captured very well by the director. It shows the viewer that it really is a harsh place to be stuck in and that it takes no prisoners. There’s also a nice soundtrack accompanying the movie too. As this isn’t an out and out horror movie there’s no gore at all apart from one scene that is. One of the team members foot is shown to be suffering badly from frostbite and the leader decides to saw part of the man’s leg off. It is quite a gruesome part of the movie and it doesn’t shirk in showing the aftermath of the amputation. The movie unfortunately also goes on for far too long. Just shy of two hours, a good 30 mins should have been cut which would have improved the pacing a little bit as well.
In the end, it was a decent try by the director to create something different from your usual Asian horrors and with more work on the script it could have been better but in the end I was frustrated more than anything else by the story. Just average for me.
Sadako’s Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
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