Ice Station Zebra Blu-ray Review
Ever get that sinking feeling?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, October 7, 2012
I grew up in the mountains outside of Salt Lake City and my parents' house had a rather precipitous rock strewn cliff
that rose up next to our driveway. When I was probably eight or nine a buddy of mine came over to play and started
laying out a scenario of us being "good guy" Americans who had to climb the rock wall to take a "German fortress" that
was supposedly at the top of the cliff. He looked straight at me and told me the name of the game was
The Guns of
Navarone. Now I was young and wasn't especially tuned in to either the literary or cinematic world at that age and
didn't realize at the time that he had obviously seen the movie on television (probably the night before) and was acting
out what he had just witnessed. I however thought that the game's name was really weird sounding, and some time
later, when I
did become aware of the film, everything clicked into place and I had a hearty laugh. Years later
as a kind of geeky teenager I joined a book club and started reading a lot of Alistair MacLean's novels. I found them
brisk and exciting, with some nice tangential historical elements and some great set pieces. MacLean had his first brush
with major mainstream prominence with
The Guns of Navarone, and once the film adaptation proved to be such
an overwhelming success, his books became hot properties in Hollywood. While 1965's
The Satan Bug had a
rather tenuous connection to its MacLean source novel, it took until 1968, some seven years after
The Guns of
Navarone debuted in theaters, for another big budget action adventure film based on a best selling MacLean novel
to hit the screen.
While this adaptation too strayed from MacLean's original conception,
Ice Station Zebra
attempted to blend some of the action adventure elements of
The Guns of Navarone with the espionage
environment of
The Satan Bug. The film might have worked as a smaller scale psychological thriller, but
someone at MGM decided this was the perfect property for what was then already a dying breed, the big budget
roadshow engagement.
Ice Station Zebra was marketed as the "big" MGM picture of the year, while another
MGM attraction that was initially derided but soon applauded as an all-time classic,
2001: A Space Odyssey,
turned out to be the film everyone was talking about. (In many markets, MGM attempted to draw people to
Ice
Station Zebra after its roadshow engagements by exhibiting it in a double feature with
2001: A Space
Odyssey, certainly
not a match
made in theatrical heaven.)
Ice Station Zebra is kind of a lumbering behemoth of a film, way too big for its own
good, That said, it has an effective opening act that at least partially makes up for a lethargic denouement that plays
more like filler than thriller.
Ice Station Zebra actually gets off to an exciting enough start, as we see a satellite of some sort making its
reentry into the Earth's atmosphere with a coterie of international military types tracking its descent. It touches down
in an Arctic wilderness and a heavily coated individual moves to it to retrieve something, not noticing that there's
someone following him. We segue quickly to Scotland, where Commander Ferraday (Rock Hudson) of the nuclear
submarine USS Tigerfish is summoned to a private meeting with an admiral (Lloyd Nolan) where he's told he is about to
command a rescue mission to the so-called Ice Station Zebra, a research station that floats with the ice pack and which
has been sending out distress signals for several days. Though the admiral doesn't completely come clean about it, he
indicates that there's another
real reason the mission is being launched, and to handle that aspect of the
outing, he'll be taking a special passenger on board.
That passenger turns out to be a prickly British gentleman perhaps pseudonymously called Mr. Jones (Patrick
McGoohan). There's little disguising the contempt that Jones and Ferraday feel for each other, and Jones makes no
bones in making it quite clear that he's in charge of the mission even though Ferraday is the putative Captain of the
submarine. There's an interesting if unintentional similarity to that "other" 1968 spectacular from MGM,
2001: A
Space Odyssey, in this general setup. In both films we have a mission shrouded in secrecy whose commander is
only dimly aware of the real reason the mission has been set into motion.
A marine contingent is rather strangely put onto the sub and then two additional passengers are flown in, Anders (Jim
Brown) and Vaslov (Ernest Borgnine). Vaslov is a former Soviet agent who has defected to the West and who is a long
time collaborator with Jones. So far, so good. We have a great cast of interesting characters, an intriguing enough
concept that leaves the audience guessing about what's really going on, and a high tech military setting that includes a
lot of (literal) bells and whistles in a nuclear submarine. And the first hour or so of
Ice Station Zebra makes the
most of all of these elements.
There are some fantastic set pieces in this opening act which include the submarine trying to find out exactly where Ice
Station Zebra might be (since it floats with the ice pack), a disastrous accident that seems to be the result of sabotage,
and, right before intermission (this being a roadshow engagement, after all), the sub finally managing to crack through
the ice pack to hopefully complete its mission, whatever that might be. But then things begin to go horribly, horribly
wrong. We've already been led to believe that there's a spy on board, courtesy of the "accident" which seems anything
but. The suspects are really limited to Jones, Anders or Vaslov, and the writing here is not nuanced enough to make
the eventual denouement much of a surprise.
More problematic is the film's ridiculously lethargic second act, which sees the bulk of the action playing out on obvious
studio sets designed to approximate the frozen Arctic wilderness. Once the real reason for the mission comes to light,
many are probably going to be asking in disbelief, "That's
it?", and that disbelief isn't just the result of a 21st
century cynicismmy hunch is audiences in 1968 were probably just as incredulous. The film devolves into a showdown
between those nefarious Russkies and the stalwart Americans, and if there's a bit of political nuance that actually
creeps into the screenplay, it's clad in an overall "us vs. them" scenario that undercuts any attempt at shades of gray.
If
Ice Station Zebra had simply been judiciously trimmed, it might have been one of the biggest blockbusters of
the late sixties. As it stands, it seems to be one of the best examples of the major studios attemptingin vainto
recapture the glory days of old with big budget epics that simply didn't have the intrinsic elements to support the
gargantuan productions. There's really nothing inherently
horrible about
Ice Station Zebra and the first
half of the film is a surprisingly brisk and exciting entertainment. There's an old adage in the legitimate theater about
"second act problems" and that's pretty much exactly what the issue with
Ice Station Zebra is. The problem is
when a film reaches its conclusion, it's that second act that's most vividly in the audience's mind, while the first act is
already beginning to fade into the cold Arctic mist.
