My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

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Saturday, January 17, 2015

A film to watch with sound on mute?

The fact that this is a nature movie that actually bored even M should be all I have to say about Expedition to the End of the World, but let me just add that this Danish documentary (2014) about a disparate group who set off on a replica tall ship to explore some of the northernmost fjords on Greenland, accessible by water for the first time, due to climate change, is a monument to missed opportunity. The film includes some beautiful footage, and it's incredibly interesting, at least for a while, to see this lonely landscape on which few if any people have set foot for hundreds of years - and of course to think that there used to be settlements here - but that source of interest wears thin after a short while as we wait for the film to develop some kind of narrative, structure, or tension - but, no, the 8 or so people on the ship are introduced to us only by their profession (The Captain, The Geologist, The Artist, etc.), as if they are Chaucerian pilgrims, and that's OK, if we actually got to see some relationships develop, some personality, some action, but no, there seems to be no chemistry at all among these people (and we learn absolutely nothing about what or whom brought them together), and for much of the film we listen in on their discussions with one another - they may be scientists and artists, but I found their conversations to be dull and self-conscious, strained. Maybe this is a film to watch with sound on mute.

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