Best Icelandic film in years!: The Deep

This has to be the best Icelandic film I've seen this year, maybe ever! (Joke) Actually, The Deep is a pretty good movie by any measure, interesting and engaging, pretty much accomplishes the goals it sets out to meet - which is a measure of success in any art form. As noted in previous posts, I always prefer a B movie that knows it's a B movie and hits the mark than a pretentious, over-stuffed would-be A movie that bores us for two+ hours. The Deep comes in at a respectable 90 minutes - and I wish more movies would try for that mark, almost any commercial movie released these days could benefit from judicious edits. The Deep is one of those "based on true events" movies - in this case about an Icelandic fishing boat that goes down in the Arctic in winter; one of the six crew members survives and swims several hours through the 40-degree water, to a remote, rocky island; scales a cliff, walks barefoot across a lava-rock field, finally gets to a small community where he collapses and is brought safely to a hospital and recovers. This is the first hour of the movie - after an initial set-up in which we meet some of the crew men at home with their families before the leave port, most of the movie is about the wreck and the journey home. The last 30 minutes feel rather deflated, as we some doctors and researchers become interested in how this guy could have survived and run some tests on him and determine what we already knew - that he has (perhaps because he's quite fat) a tremendous resistance to cold and to lower body temp. That said, the final minutes of the movie are very sweet - as the sailor, Gulli, remembers his thoughts - which he'd articulated - about what he'd do if he survived; he had dreamed of a rendez-vous with a beautiful girl in town (we'd seen her briefly in a bar scene early in the movie) - in his fantasy while swimming, she met him at the door, like in a Viagra ad. In the reality, at the end of the movie, he just looks up at her house, her lighted window. This, to its great credit, is not a Hollywood ending. The guy, injured though he is, has only one, lonely course through life, and at the end he boards another fishing vessel. Over the credits we see something that has become a bit of a cliche but always draws my interest - actual newsreel footage of the guy on whom the story was based - heavier, and homelier, than the lead actor - which grounds the movie firmly in reality. That's a good thing, actually, as if this movie had been entirely fictional our reaction would be: nah, could never happen, and we'd be much less interested and caught up in his plight and danger. Some great scenes, both of his trek and of his re-adjustment to small-city life, in a movie that's not actually great but is worth watching.