Review for Arctic Blast

Introduction

Once in a while, I want to see something different, something I have never seen before. I get this first time feeling when I discover something new, a new way of thinking, a new way of doing things, just someone taking a chance in cinema, creating something original instead of regurgitating the tried and tested output of the Hollywood conveyer belt. I have never seen a Tasmanian disaster movie before. Anticipating a horde of rampaging Tasmanian devils, whirlwinding their way through towns and cities, I placed Arctic Blast into my DVD player. To be honest, I wasn't really expecting that, but I also wasn't expecting every single disaster movie cliché of the last thirty years to be distilled into 90 minutes. Watch as all those recognisable Tasmanian landmarks get frost CGI'd onto them in Arctic Blast, a movie you'll have seen before, even if you've never seen it before.


Jack Tate (hero name right there) is an American meteorologist working in Tasmania, keeping an eye on the ozone hole. He's a dedicated scientist, even though it means that his marriage suffers, and he's in the preliminary stages of a divorce to wife Emma, something their daughter Naomi isn't taking well. His wife accuses him of neglecting his family to go off around the world being all meteorological, but who can blame him when a solar eclipse punches an unprecedented hole in the ozone layer, and all the freezing cold air up top starts dropping down, creating a cold front of an unprecedented -80ºF. It's cold enough to freeze a person instantly. As long as that hole stays open, the cold will keep coming, spreading across the world. Worse, the ripple effect starts opening further holes, over Tokyo, London, Moscow... Jack, being the renegade whistleblower type that he is, finds it hard to convince his boss, or the local authorities to take him seriously...

The Disc

Arctic Blast comes on this disc from Lionsgate in a wholly vanilla form. The film is presented with an animated menu screen, with only chapter select and play options available. The 1.78:1 anamorphic image is clear and sharp, strong in detail, and brings across the film without flaw. There's shimmer on the finest of detail which is to be expected, and unfortunately the film's woeful CGI and unconvincing effects come across with absolute clarity. The sole audio track is a DD 5.1 English track, with a bit of surround oomph to it. Subtitles are missing, which in this case would be a blessing, except the painful dialogue is absolutely clear and audible throughout.

Conclusion

Devlin and Emmerich have been destroying the world in some form or another for years, and it's the ongoing and developing climate change controversy and crises that inspired their Day After Tomorrow movie, one which was enjoyable enough, once you got past the po-faced pontificating, and which was quite rightly lampooned for its total ignorance of the actual science. The Day After Tomorrow itself inspired countless, straight to DVD, and straight to Channel 5 movies and mini-series, all looking at various weather inspired natural disasters. Once again, movies about floods, ice ages, droughts, hurricanes, and tornadoes joined movies about earthquakes, volcanoes and meteors in a way that was last seen during the 1970s. Arctic Blast is just another such film in the canon.


Of course, like most of its ilk, Arctic Blast's budget is so low, that there's no way that they can match the effects bonanza of a Hollywood blockbuster, and neither can they supply the variety of bad weather that spiced up something like The Day After Tomorrow. In fact, you can't get cheaper, and simpler than Arctic Blast. Here, humanity is threatened by a freezing fog, which is easy to paint in with CGI (or use stock footage of San Francisco on a foggy day), and the most destructive thing that happens is that a frost forms, again easy to accomplish with CGI, and cheap too. Also, compared the dumb, stupid, moronic, ass-backwards, so-called pseudo science in Arctic Blast, The Day After Tomorrow should have won a Nobel Prize for physics. A hole in the ozone layer lets all the cold in!?!? A person freezes instantaneously at -80ºF!?!? Yeesh!


Anyway, you have the hero scientist (Daniel Jackson from SG1) who no one listens to even though everything he says is touched with divine rightness. You have his boss (Senator Kelly from X-Men) who arrogantly does things his own way, even though he knows Daniel Jackson from SG1 is always right. You have the marital strife which will be tested by, and eventually resolved because of the crisis. You have the daughter enthused by teenage rebellion and disdain at her ever absent father, who will need rescuing by him. You have the diabetic co-worker who has forgotten her insulin. And you have dialogue so bad, so clichéd that hearing each successive, utterly predictable line will make you groan in embarrassment.


There are films that are so bad that they become good. Arctic Blast is so bad that it compounds its dire nature into a continuum of vapidity all its own. It may be the world's first Tasmanian disaster movie, but that's no reason to watch it, as it will only have you hoping that it remains the world's only Tasmanian disaster movie.