Against the Ice review – simple but sturdy Netflix survival drama
An unusual expedition here for Netflix, unusual less for the nature of the expedition itself and more for the ambition of it, a rare film for the streamer that allows us to travel with characters to a real location, a world away from green screens and sound stages. It shouldn’t be quite this much of a unique selling point but in the age of modestly budgeted fare crafted for the smallest of screens, the sheer on-the-ground expanse of old-fashioned survival adventure Against the Ice immediately separates it from the many other films landing, or most often crash-landing, on the platform.
It’s a vital separation from its contemporary streaming peers as when compared with the big-screen films that have come before in this particular genre, it’s a familiar tale told robustly but with very little distinguishing flair. It’s a passion project for the Game of Thrones alum Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who both co-writes and stars as the Danish explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen, but this passion is mostly restrained on screen, a polite, by-the-numbers story of men fighting the elements that should satisfy those seeking a simple, sturdy throwback drama. Those hoping for anything extra will leave feeling a little cold.
It’s the true story of the Danish expedition to Greenland in 1909, one to disprove the American claim to the north-eastern territory based on a belief that it was broken up into separate pieces of land. Captain Mikkelsen (who in real life would have been just 29 at the time, a slight stretch for the 51-year-old Coster-Waldau) is following in the footsteps of an ill-fated prior attempt, aiming to recover the bodies or discoveries of the men who came before them. To make the final trek, he must leave his crew on the ship and brave the extremes, a 400-mile round trip that will require a partner. The only volunteer is mechanic Iver (Joe Cole), inexperienced but eager, and so the two set out, aware that they might never come back.
But while the characters might be risking life and limb to trek into uncharted territory, it’s a familiar route for the rest of us. It’s a mostly enjoyable one, though, not quite as gripping as it could have been given the intensity of the situation, but charged with just about enough forward momentum to keep us onboard. The film’s most effective moments are those that teeter on the brink of catastrophe, an uneasy tension born from the knowledge that in a place such as this, death is always just one false move away. And it’s not just from falling off the edge of an icy verge or into freezing water (pushed by a rather shoddy-looking CGI bear), but also from ruined or lost supplies, injured or killed snow dogs, the constant fear that something is about to go wrong and then all might be lost.
Adapted from Mikkelsen’s posthumously published book (which means we’re never completely in the dark over where we’re headed), Against the Ice is a Danish story flattened for a global audience. The decision is made for characters to speak in English with a variety of regional British accents, a slightly jarring sacrifice to increase eyeballs that, for a story all about an ambitious country trying to make strides to end a debate of who-owns-what with another, makes it feel a little confused. There’s a similar lack of specificity with much of the dialogue which at times feels too simplified and at others, far too modern (were people in 1909 really asking others to go for a “walk and talk”?).
Like many of his Game of Thrones co-stars, Coster-Waldau has mostly struggled to find his groove outside of Westeros and while he’s far too old to be playing Mikkelsen (the dramatic shift of watching someone in their late 20s v early 50s grapple with such responsibility is huge), he makes for an adequate lead, tasked mostly with tersely reacting to bad things happening. The last act pushes him into hallucinatory mode, to try to bridge the gap between
home and away, which makes for a mostly unconvincing lurch to the finish line. But it’s an otherwise satisfying end to the kind of journey that we’ve taken many times before and will most likely take again. Perhaps next time it might even be one to truly remember.
Against the Ice is now available on Netflix
fully left the US and spent a blissful three weeks in England in autumn 1964, enjoying London nightlife and the sights and even visiting Liverpool – though, unfortunately, they did not cross paths with any of the Beatles.
My Ticket to Ride is far from the only Beatles book released last year. Most notably, Paul McCartney’s bestselling The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present arrived weeks after The Beatles: Get Back, a companion piece to Peter Jackson’s epic-length documentary. But Mitchell’s memoir is one of the few Beatles books written by a woman in the 60 years since they released their debut single. The Beatles have profoundly shaped and enriched the lives of women, but the literature, journalism and critical scholarship – with a few notable exceptions – tends to focus disproportionately on how men experience and appreciate the band and its music.
“For a generation X woman coming up in the 1990s, the odds of placing a Beatles-related story or interview at a major publication felt like 100-1,” says music journalist Kristi York Wooten. Yet in recent years more scholars, journalists, musicians and podcasters are challenging conventional Beatles narratives and expanding who gets to lead conversations around the band. To Wooten, this shift is long overdue. “Media coverage of the band’s evolution has depicted women as bystanders, rendering our stories of the music’s impact inferior or merely tied to fandom.”
Ardent Beatles fandom isn’t always viewed in a positive light, despite how vital it was to the band’s success. As critic Sasha Geffen writes in Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary: “Without Beatles girls, there’s no Beatles. Each group forged its identity in relation to the other.” Yet the narrow stereotype of a Beatles fan that crystallised during the 1960s – think a teenage girl screaming over the band because they’re so cute – lingers.
“Female scholars who are also fans of the Beatles still run the risk of being perceived as more of a fan than as an authoritative voice,” says Dr Christine Feldman-Barrett, a senior lecturer in sociology at Griffith University and author of last year’s A Women’s History of the Beatles. “The legacy of the ‘hysterical’ female Beatles fan is such that it has, I believe, made a good amount of women reluctant to write about the Beatles until more recently.”
Feldman-Barrett’s book is a comprehensive corrective to outdated modes of thinking. It delves into lesser-covered topics ripe for analysis (such as how the Beatles influenced female musicians) and takes a fresh look at Beatlemania, the women of the Beatles’ universe and fan relationships with the band.
The book grew out of Feldman-Barrett’s lifelong appreciation for a band that opened her eyes to other subjects, such as “British history, the interest in eastern spirituality in the 1960s”, she says. “It’s really been a portal into different interests.” As Geffen writes: “A girl could invest her desire in the band, but she could also discover herself there.”
Decades later, the Beatles’ ability to spark curiosity persists across generations. Growing up in the UK, musician and author Stephanie Phillips was struck by the Beatles’ cultural omnipresence. “As a young person who wanted to develop my own sense of self, it almost felt overwhelming,” she says. Coming to the band’s music in her 20s via noisier covers by American bands such as Pixies and Throwing Muses “gave the Beatles this alternative sheen and almost made them sound like an obscure underground cult band,” she says.
Such sonic leeway shaped the music Phillips makes in the punk band Big Joanie – she references both the White Album’s “experimental song structures” and the taut songcraft of the Beatles’ “earlier, pop-centric albums” – and helped her cement a different perception of the band. “My version of the Beatles wrote short and snappy love songs, experimented with every genre possible and was clear about the cultures they were influenced by,” she says. “It is in my mind a more expansive and inclusive version of the Beatles than the band that I grew up hearing on the TV as a kid.”
Dr Holly Tessler vividly recalls hearing news reports on John Lennon’s 1980 murder, although she didn’t know who the musician was at the time. “Being the dorky kid I was, rather than listening to the music, I decided it was going to be a research project,” she says. The 10-year-old borrowed Nicholas Schaffner’s The Boys from Liverpool from the library and spent the next few weeks reading (and re-reading) the book, “boring all of my friends and family” by peppering them with Beatles facts. “After what must have been an interminable amount of time, my parents just said: ‘Here, kid, listen to music.’ And there was no going back.”
Tessler’s subsequent insatiable interest in all aspects of the Beatles led her into academia and founding the University of Liverpool masters programme The Beatles: Music Industry and Heritage. Launched in September 2021, it offers a rigorous study of the band’s cultural, media and economic impact. Tessler says the class is diverse, spanning new graduates to mature students in their 60s. “I was a little bit concerned that there would be a big division,” she says. “They’ve all sort of bonded now. And everybody’s a happy little group of Beatles students together.”
The younger generations of Beatles fans who came to the band long after their breakup are even less beholden to rigid historical narratives surrounding the group, says Tessler. “[They’re] much more plugged into debates around gender and sexualities than earlier generations would have been.”
It’s a conversation that has been broadened by the podcast world. “I see more young fans wanting to move away from the ‘who do we blame for the breakup’ approach, and more towards an approach that analyses everyone’s individual experiences, emotions, and points of view,” says Thalia Reynolds, who co-hosts Another Kind of Mind: A Different Kind of Beatles Podcast with Daphne Mitchell and Phoebe Lorde. The show operates as a collective of voices presentingthoroughly researched episodes (sample: “Jealous Guy: Lennon-McCartney and Competitive Admiration”). “We thought it was past time the Beatles were discussed with empathy and humanity,” says Lorde. “That means making the effort to see things from every perspective.”
The podcast’s co-hosts say the Beatles have shaped their lives in numerous ways: influencing them to perform, write and develop an appreciation for music; deepen friendships; and even find solace in discussions about topics such as John Lennon’s sexuality. “The Beatles’ music, their story, their selves are uniquely comforting,” says Mitchell.
It isn’t necessarily a given that multiple generations of Beatles fans will get along. Allison Boron grew up a fan of the Monkees and Beatles. As a teenager, she eventually found kindred spirits in the latter’s nascent, circa-Y2K online community. “I can’t imagine who I would be without the Beatles,” she says. “It sounds crazy sometimes when I hear myself say that, but there’s really no way they haven’t impacted my life.” One early job working for a local Beatles tribute band piqued her interest in the music industry, where she works today.
In 2018, she launched the podcast BC the Beatles. Boron recalls how she and co-host Erika White received plenty of encouragement from older fans. But they also experienced ageism, sexism and fandom gatekeeping. “We were bumping up against people who didn’t think we had a place at the table because we weren’t there originally,” she says. “We were having a hard time getting taken seriously.”
Empathy for the unfairly maligned Yoko Ono inspired the launch of All About the Girl, a Liverpool-based podcast. “All my life I had heard all sorts about her, that she was some kind of talentless destructive force, or a joke,” says co-host Chloe Walls. “Only when I started to do my own research did I grasp the total disservice done to her by the mainstream narrative.” Walls came to love Ono’s music while researching the Beatles after seeing the 2019 movie Yesterday; she was “irritated” by how the film “fundamentally misunderstood what made the Beatles great.”
Several podcasters interviewed mentioned Beatles fan fiction and fan art as an influence on their fandom – and especially that of younger generations. For Walls, the Beatles’ online fandom was also formative in that it “allowed me to be creative in a space with other likeminded people” and also introduced her to her partner (and podcast co-host) Daisy Cooper. The pair met in 2020 on Tumblr, “in a discussion about the relationship between John and Paul,” Walls says.
As an adult, My Ticket to Ride author Mitchell worked as a journalist and a private investigator. While writing her book, she used those skills to try to figure out aspects of her painful childhood. She discovered greater empathy for her younger self – as well as perspective on how hearing I Want to Hold Your Hand altered the trajectory of her life. “If I had never heard the Beatles at that time, my life would have been completely different.”
• My Ticket to Ride: How I Ran Away to England to Meet the Beatles and Got Rock and Roll Banned in Cleveland by Janice Mitchell is published by Gray & Company.