'Ice Station Zebra' movie review: I have a sinking feeling about this.....
Ice Station Zebra (1968)
Directed by John Sturges
Screenplay by Douglas Heyes, Harry Julian Fink, and W.R.
Burnett, based on the novel by Alistair MacLean
Starring: Rock Hudson, Patrick MacGoohan, Ernest Borgnine,
Jim Brown
John Sturges' Ice Station Zebra, based on
Alistair MacLean's novel and written by Douglas Heyes Harry Julian Fink, and
W.R. Burnett, is a Cold War-era "restoring the balance of power"
film. It focuses on a mixed bag of Navy
and Marine personnel, a Russian defector, and a mysterious British agent on a
risky mission to the Arctic Circle to retrieve the contents of a crashed Soviet
spy satellite's cameras.
On paper, this 1968
technothriller looks promising, considering it features a U.S. nuclear sub (the
USS Tigerfish), a noteworthy cast (Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine,
Patrick MacGoohan, and ex-football great Jim Brown), and one of those
race-the-Russians-to-the-gizmo plots that would later be the heart of such novels
as The Hunt for Red October and Cardinal of the
Kremlin. As icing on the cake, it also has a proven director at its helm;
Sturges, after all, had directed The Magnificent Seven and The
Great Escape, which were excellent films.
Alas, Ice Station Zebra might have looked good to producer Martin Ransonhoff when Sturges and Heyes were pitching it in his office. However, it doesn't work well on screen. With a running time of two hours and 28 minutes, it's too long for what little actual story it has. In addition, the thinness of the plot is compounded by unresolved plot points, barebones acting by Hudson and Borgnine, and really cheap-looking special effects.
To be honest, I've never read MacLean's novel, so I'm not sure if screenwriter Heyes should get all my critical darts, but some of the things that bother me about Ice Station Zebra include its ponderous pace and hard-to-believe plot points.
For starters, we're told that the Tigerfish has to get to Ice Station Zebra from its Holy Loch (Scotland) base in three days. Even if the sub is nuclear powered, it can't simply run at flank speed under the ice pack in that short time span.
Second, in one of the movie's few exciting sequences, someone forces a torpedo tube open and allows several tons of seawater inside before the frantic crew saves the Tigerfish from sinking, but...um, who did it?
Alas, Ice Station Zebra might have looked good to producer Martin Ransonhoff when Sturges and Heyes were pitching it in his office. However, it doesn't work well on screen. With a running time of two hours and 28 minutes, it's too long for what little actual story it has. In addition, the thinness of the plot is compounded by unresolved plot points, barebones acting by Hudson and Borgnine, and really cheap-looking special effects.
To be honest, I've never read MacLean's novel, so I'm not sure if screenwriter Heyes should get all my critical darts, but some of the things that bother me about Ice Station Zebra include its ponderous pace and hard-to-believe plot points.
For starters, we're told that the Tigerfish has to get to Ice Station Zebra from its Holy Loch (Scotland) base in three days. Even if the sub is nuclear powered, it can't simply run at flank speed under the ice pack in that short time span.
Second, in one of the movie's few exciting sequences, someone forces a torpedo tube open and allows several tons of seawater inside before the frantic crew saves the Tigerfish from sinking, but...um, who did it?
Heyes and Sturges never tell us who did it, or if the
culprit had an accomplice. The why part is obvious, of course;
the Soviets don't want the Americans to reach Ice Station Zebra. But, really,
it would have been nice to know if it was Boris Vaslov (played by Academy
Award-winner Borgnine with a Russian accent so fake it makes Mario Van Peebles'
Jamaican accent in Jaws 4 sound good) or even the shady
British agent David Jones (MacGoohan).
Of the two co-leads, MacGoohan as Jones comes off the best, even if he is merely doing a riff on his roles as British TV's Secret Agent and The Prisoner. MacGoohan comes across as charming, witty, even offbeat, yet capable of killing you in a heartbeat if he thought it was necessary.
Of the two co-leads, MacGoohan as Jones comes off the best, even if he is merely doing a riff on his roles as British TV's Secret Agent and The Prisoner. MacGoohan comes across as charming, witty, even offbeat, yet capable of killing you in a heartbeat if he thought it was necessary.
He has a few good scenes with Rock Hudson's Commander
Ferraday; their relationship is akin to that of a cobra with a mongoose, and it
is the movie's main source of dramatic interest/conflict.
David Jones: May I ask, Captain, when we expect to reach the ice barrier?
Cmdr. Ferraday: Yes, you may ask.
On the other hand, Hudson doesn't stir up much interest or audience empathy. He is rather distant and stiff in his manner, and he's never as humanly engaging as, say, Scott Glenn in a similar role in 1990's The Hunt for Red October. In most of his scenes with MacGoohan's Jones, Commander Ferraday seems to be always in a prickly mood, and one gets the impression that the sooner Jones is off the boat, the better the captain will feel.
Cmdr. Ferraday: We operate on a first-name basis. My first name is Captain.
As Marine detachment commander Captain Leslie Anders, Jim Brown only has a few lines of laconic jarhead speak, which is fine because his role is equivalent to that of a red-shirted security officer aboard the Starship Enterprise, i.e., cannon fodder. He's okay, I suppose, but he gives a better performance in Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen.
The film is saddled with many inconsistencies and suffers from lapses of logic and bad storytelling. For instance, we know that skin exposed to cold weather is vulnerable to exposure. Frostbite can set in, and in cases of extreme exposure, a person’s nose can fall off in subzero temperatures.
David Jones: May I ask, Captain, when we expect to reach the ice barrier?
Cmdr. Ferraday: Yes, you may ask.
On the other hand, Hudson doesn't stir up much interest or audience empathy. He is rather distant and stiff in his manner, and he's never as humanly engaging as, say, Scott Glenn in a similar role in 1990's The Hunt for Red October. In most of his scenes with MacGoohan's Jones, Commander Ferraday seems to be always in a prickly mood, and one gets the impression that the sooner Jones is off the boat, the better the captain will feel.
Cmdr. Ferraday: We operate on a first-name basis. My first name is Captain.
As Marine detachment commander Captain Leslie Anders, Jim Brown only has a few lines of laconic jarhead speak, which is fine because his role is equivalent to that of a red-shirted security officer aboard the Starship Enterprise, i.e., cannon fodder. He's okay, I suppose, but he gives a better performance in Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen.
The film is saddled with many inconsistencies and suffers from lapses of logic and bad storytelling. For instance, we know that skin exposed to cold weather is vulnerable to exposure. Frostbite can set in, and in cases of extreme exposure, a person’s nose can fall off in subzero temperatures.
Yet, in the Soviet-American faceoff at the North Pole, we
see U.S. Navy sailors and Marines squaring off with the Soviets with no
headgear or cold-weather facial protection (not even a scarf!) to shield
themselves from the chilly winds of the Arctic. (Yeah, Jeff East as young Clark
Kent in 1978's Superman: The Movie didn't look too cold when
he was "building" the Fortress of Solitude, but he was, after all,
Superman.)
Oh, and even if we take into consideration that Ice Station Zebra was made in 1968, the special effects are, well, less than special.
Oh, and even if we take into consideration that Ice Station Zebra was made in 1968, the special effects are, well, less than special.
The underwater stuff is all right, I suppose, but the satellite
shown floating above the earth in the beginning looks less than convincing; I
have Star Wars toys that look better than that. The Arctic
backdrops look like what they are - painted backgrounds on a soundstage, and
the scenes when the Russian paratroopers finally arrive are
not only cheap-looking (toy paratroopers being dropped on a table top model)
but inconsistent as hell. The Soviets fly (or flew) MiG-21 Fishbeds, so why, in
one shot, do we see a McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom II?
In short, Ice Station Zebra fails to work either as a serious Cold War examination of brinksmanship or as an entertaining action-adventure romp. It's a lethargic, sleep-inducing, by-the-numbers work from a director otherwise known for great macho-type adventures, and its predictability and lack of human interest makes this one of the lesser films based on a MacLean novel.
In short, Ice Station Zebra fails to work either as a serious Cold War examination of brinksmanship or as an entertaining action-adventure romp. It's a lethargic, sleep-inducing, by-the-numbers work from a director otherwise known for great macho-type adventures, and its predictability and lack of human interest makes this one of the lesser films based on a MacLean novel.
Blu-ray
Specifications
Video
Codec: MPEG-4 AVC (29.93 Mbps)
Resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.19:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.20:1
Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: Dolby Digital 2.0
Spanish: Dolby Digital Mono
Subtitles
English SDH, French, Spanish
Discs
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Playback
Region free
Rated: G (General Audience)
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Release Date: October 9, 2012
Run Time: 148 minutes
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