Dir. Dominic Sena, US, 2009, 101 mins
Cast: Kate Beckinsale, Tom Skerritt, Gabriel Macht
Review by Joyce Dundas
Whiteout is a murder mystery set in Antarctica , easily one of the harshest and most interesting locations to set a story. A body is found far out on the ice floes, frozen stiff, mutilated and without a face. He is one of the American research team whose camp was on that spot up until a couple of days before. It is Antarctica 's first homicide, but not the last as the bodies start to pile up.
Kate Beckinsale has restyled her English Rose image into an action heroine with the Underworld franchise, so you would expect her to do some justice to Carrie Stetko, the hard-nosed US Marshal who is assigned to find the killer. She has three days before the whiteout of the title sets in and she has to leave the base before she is snowed in for six months, when no one gets in or out.
Unfortunately, from the moment she is introduced, in a gratuitous shower shot reportedly of her body double, her character fails to engage on many levels. In fact, none of the characters have much depth to them, which is ironic considering the film is based on a graphic novel where the characters may have been drawn in two dimensions, but come off the page fully formed. Greg Rucka's novel conveys the cold loneliness of Antarctica , and does it completely in black and white, and it gives Carrie a real personality.
One of the main problems in adapting this as a film is that in the action sequences with all the characters dressed in parkas and covered in snow, it becomes impossible to tell them apart. A shame since the book is particularly engaging and deserved a better handling. Rucka should also have been asked to write the script because where his book had a few surprises as you turn the pages, this film flags up any plot twist well in advance and the characters indulge in way, waaaayyy, to much exposition.
It is ironic that the film is released in the same week as the rerelease of John Carpenter's The Thing, which has to be the ultimate ‘stranded in an ice station with a killer' movie. Whiteout will suffer in any comparison with this classic, because it tries to muddy the frozen waters with hints that there could be a supernatural cause to the death or some kind of superhuman maniac behind it. The real story is far less exciting. |
