A Life Spent Reading

Okay, this was a bad movie. I mean, I was prepared for it to be bad, but not bad. Gorgeously shot and heavy on atmosphere, pretty much everything else disappoints (and that’s not easy to do when you have Michael Mann directing and Gong Li in the cast). I don’t make a point of trying to figure things out in advance, but this flick is so by-the-numbers that when there is a more or less gratuitous love scene thrown in after about fifteen minutes, you know that the only reason it’s there is to set up how pissed off one of the characters is going to be when his girlfriend gets taken hostage by the bad guys. The dialog is clichéd, the plot is old moth-eaten hat (with holes the size of the hand grenade that Crockett somehow pulls out… after he’s been searched by bodyguards), and sorry, but Colin Farrell ain’t no Don Johnson. (And I have to say that it’s amazing just how little passion there seems to be in his love scenes with Gong Li. Really makes me wonder about the guy.) I did prefer Jamie Foxx to Philip Michael Thomas as Tubbs, but that’s about it.

Unbelievable when you think about the original series, but this movie is actually boring. Don’t bother with it.

Dan Simmons, who seems to be able to write anything, and write it very well, has produced a beautifully flowing novel that combines historical fact with a good dollop of fantasy/horror. The base of the story is formed around the mystery of what happened to Captain John Franklin’s “Lost Expedition” back in the late 1840s. Franklin was one of the last explorers looking for the fabled Northwest Passage, and no one has ever definitively found out what happened to his two ships and crew (although later explorers have pieced together much of the puzzle). The sound-bite is: two ships, The Erebus and The Terror , go into the Arctic, get stuck in the ice, and never come out.

It is Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, in command of The Terror (second in command overall), who is the protagonist of the story. And the book’s title is taken not only from the name of his ship, but from a monstrous thing that stalks his crew during their time stranded in and on the ice.

I normally don’t care much for horror, but I liked the way that this was done. Eskimo mythology combines with semi-modern science to produce, in Simmons’ deft hands, a tale that is equal parts fact and fantasy. Although the main part of the story tracks the crews as they slowly starve to death, the story is surprisingly free of morbidity. Simmons uses the large number of crew members to show a variety of perspectives about their situation, and how they choose to die. And I liked the ending very much; it was, if anything, uplifting.

A year or two freezing and starving to death in the Arctic might not sound like much of a story, but even though the book is over 750 pages long, I never got tired of it. If you like historical fiction, or fantasy, or horror, it is highly recommended.