Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Lots of films begin well. SSoS begins exceptionally well. Aside from Orman being so attractive, there's so much potential; e.g., particularly the opening moments and it's potential relationship to the rest of the movie. And SSoS is able to sustain this level of suspense and intrigue for over an hour. After that, this viewer began to see that the filmmakers were unable to translate from the page to the screen as well with the tale's action-oriented, big-setting second half. Preposterous characters and events intrude. The last fifteen minutes of the work are - with due sincerity and sarcasm aside - laughable; e.g., stock footage of glacier shelving, iceberg birthing, etc., ridiculously interspersed with a sunny day where obviously nothing is happening. It's a shame. To say SSoS fizzles out is an understatement. Evaporates would be a better description.

I really liked the main characters - a strong but seemingly cold-hearted woman and her strange neighbor who manages to be attractive and pitiful at the same time. One of the rare movies in which I was as much interested in the characters and their development as in the story line.Unfortunately half-way through the movie the events become more and more unbelievable and convoluted. People get killed, stuff explodes and our half-Inuit heroine goes through it like Lara Croft, with the difference that she keeps surviving not by skill or guns but by pure chance. The ending seems taken from an 80's James Bond movie. Disappointing for those of us who are not fond of evil scientist / mysterious forces clichés.

This movie promises to be great but fails to deliver. Julia Ormond is gorgeous and her character is intriguing. It starts out as a tight suspenseful thriller, but comes completely unraveled at the end. A lot is made of Smilla's knowledge of snow but it's only used once. She has a deep interest in mathematics that is not used at all except to make a neat little speech about numbers.The film becomes implausible towards the end and the finale must have been grafted on from a tawdry B science fiction movie. I can't remember a more ludicrous explanation in any movie ever. Very disappointing after the good start.

Parts were good but does not stand up on the whole. Very unrealistic and un-researched, asking the audience to swallow a lot of basic inconsistent crap, something that would get most continuity people fired in today's market. Eg. Why are they simply standing around an un-fenced off pool of deadly organisms in a pristine lab setting, not to mention that it's surrounded by slippery ice. Also, what was this GM's crime anyway? (He was likely doing what would have been done anyway by his own employees but with government regulation and observation.) The infection of the boy was not intentional. Not disclosing it was illegal but the child was treated/observed. Nowhere in this film is it mentioned or even properly implied that the boy might have been an experiment or that treatment was withheld purposefully so that they could watch the organism evolve in a human subject. It was implied though that the disease was untreatable and fatal in every case, that to disturb the "worm" was to invite catastrophe. That the boy was necessarily misused was not clear at all. Nor was it necessarily communicated that any kind of haste or greed was ultimately responsible for what happened, not at all. Director and screenwriter were asking a lot of the audience that should have been delivered by them. This also struck me as an exercise of moralization by people who were over their heads in the subject matter and taking their first run at it, making a lot of mistakes along the way and aimed at an audience whose level of candor/maturity was not up to the more rigorous detail and syllogisms of genuine ethical debate.Gave me a large headache.