This is a replacement comment, the original having been removed because of a complaint.
Ordinarily, when there is a book involved, I prefer to judge the movie as independently as I can. But in this case, the movie is so tepid, and the book so alive I cannot avoid it.
Toward the end of the film, a bad guy explains that the thing in front of him is not a meteorite. They are cold and dead and this is warm and alive he says. Then the film blows it up. I felt this way about the possibilities of the novel.
It was originally written in Danish I think, but the English translation I read was superb. It was fashioned as a thriller/mystery, but the journey was through an inventive inner dialog that abstracted the world of Copenhagen as if it were Inuit, and human love and intrigue as if it were snow. It was not life-altering but striking and extremely well done. In the same way that science fiction can make the world more real by slanting it a bit, this made some female urges and fears more real and accessible to me than usual. I was affected.
Inner dialogs in film are hard. Shifting abstractions to a set unfamiliar to the viewer is even harder. Trying to fit squarely in the thriller movie genre makes it impossible. So the failure is easy to understand, at least superficially. But there is something in the way the book moved that could have been captured in film without stretching the vocabulary much.
Apart from the clever starting point and narrative perspective, and similarly apart from the conventional ending the amazing thing was how one morphed to the other slowly, continuously, seamlessly and without the reader even noticing. There were some things carried over: the book went from an inner ice to a real ice world. It went from internal mental battles to internal physical battles to simple physical battles. But these were not what was relied on. There was a deliberate evolution of the narrative stance. This is extremely rare, I believe, and it was knowingly controlled. I wish something like this had conveyed in the film.
As it is, there is a mystery, then some lovemaking, then the thriller. I'm going to give this a two just based on the book.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
Ordinarily, when there is a book involved, I prefer to judge the movie as independently as I can. But in this case, the movie is so tepid, and the book so alive I cannot avoid it.
Toward the end of the film, a bad guy explains that the thing in front of him is not a meteorite. They are cold and dead and this is warm and alive he says. Then the film blows it up. I felt this way about the possibilities of the novel.
It was originally written in Danish I think, but the English translation I read was superb. It was fashioned as a thriller/mystery, but the journey was through an inventive inner dialog that abstracted the world of Copenhagen as if it were Inuit, and human love and intrigue as if it were snow. It was not life-altering but striking and extremely well done. In the same way that science fiction can make the world more real by slanting it a bit, this made some female urges and fears more real and accessible to me than usual. I was affected.
Inner dialogs in film are hard. Shifting abstractions to a set unfamiliar to the viewer is even harder. Trying to fit squarely in the thriller movie genre makes it impossible. So the failure is easy to understand, at least superficially. But there is something in the way the book moved that could have been captured in film without stretching the vocabulary much.
Apart from the clever starting point and narrative perspective, and similarly apart from the conventional ending the amazing thing was how one morphed to the other slowly, continuously, seamlessly and without the reader even noticing. There were some things carried over: the book went from an inner ice to a real ice world. It went from internal mental battles to internal physical battles to simple physical battles. But these were not what was relied on. There was a deliberate evolution of the narrative stance. This is extremely rare, I believe, and it was knowingly controlled. I wish something like this had conveyed in the film.
As it is, there is a mystery, then some lovemaking, then the thriller. I'm going to give this a two just based on the book.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.