Artic Blast is one of those silly but fun disaster movies that
the Sy Fy Channel airs on the MOST AMAZING NIGHT OF TELEVISON (or words to that
effect), a.k.a. Saturday nights. Michael Shanks, best known for playing Daniel
Jackson for nine seasons on Stargate: SG-1 (he left in the sixth season, then
came to his senses and returned) stars here as Jack Tate, an American scientist
working in Australia who’s busy monitoring the weather for an international
consortium of weather watchers that’s run by a persnickety fellow named Winslaw
(Bruce Davison, who’s clearly in it for the paycheck).
As the film explains in
an opening narration, the coldest areas on the planet are not the North and South
poles, it’s the Mesosphere, a section of our atmosphere that we’re normally
protected from by the ozone layer. But, as you might suspect, the ozone layer
breaks down, and since cold air always falls, the super freezing air of the
Mesosphere drops to the surface of the Earth--just off the coast of
Australia--and starts flash-freezing everything it comes in contact with,
beginning with a research vessel filled with earnest young scientists, which
becomes the Good Ship Popsicle as it runs aground in Tasmania.
Taking his clues
from this freakish accident, Jack tries to warn people that the approaching cold
front is a mega disaster in the making. But apparently nobody in the cast has
seen The Day After Tomorrow (which this flick rifts from), and everybody
ignores Jack, much to their peril. The CGI effects are well done, but the ice fog bank that stalks people doesn’t
look very visually impressive, nor is it very threatening. The dopey script
piles on one crisis on top of another (they’re trapped in the frozen-over lab
with a lab assistant who’s a diabetic and she forgot her insulin! Ruh-oh!) to
the point where it makes a viewer wonder if he’s actually watching the Perils
Of Pauline.
But it’s also nice to see a film that’s been partially shot in
Australia (half of it was also filmed in Canada) that actually takes place there.
The extras in the Australian scenes, which were shot in the city of Hobart, look
like they were having a good time running around with enthusiasm like the panicked extras that they
were in a disaster film. Yes, Artic Blast is extremely silly, and the science
is screwed up big time, but it’s still got plenty of good performances--starting
with Shanks himself--that makes it very watchable. If you’re looking for a
fun, goofy SF disaster flick to pass the time, you could do a lot worse than this.
--SF
