I just watched this movie on DVD and I thought it was AWESOME! (Ok, sorry about the caps and the exclamation mark, but it was.)

The only thing I found unrealistic about it was the plane crash (I don't think I'm giving anything away, the minute you find out the lead character is a pilot, you just know there's going to be a plane crash in the movie, right?) An oil leak/partial engine failure is not going to render the aircraft uncontrollable. They could have achieved the same result in a much more realistic fashion without the histrionics of the pilot screaming "aaarrrrgghhh!" as he desperately tries to pull up the nose of the "stricken" airplane.

Whether the director read Laurence Gonzales's book ("Deep Survival") or not, there was a lot in the movie that could have been using it as a reference. Charlie's relative lack of preparedness for the arctic conditions, his brash overconfidence (e.g. his assumption that he could walk two or three hundred miles across the tundra to civilisation as if it was the same as, say, hitchhiking from Montreal to Ottawa). His transformation from "ignorant city slicker" to "snow walker" reminded me of Gonzales's description of Ken Killip, who got lost in Rocky Mountain National Park in 1998.

I didn't find the way the Inuit woman, Kanaalaq, was portrayed to be in any way unrealistic; there was none of the "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" balderdash about her being able to defy the laws of physics, that one often finds in movies that try to glamorise other cultures. Everything she did was simply something that, when you think about it, must have been second nature to anyone who was raised in that environment. (The scene where she started a fire using a flint and steel with only two sharp blows may have been slightly exaggerated - but then again, maybe not.)

If anyone gets a chance to rent this movie on DVD, I highly recommend it. It would be a great movie to educate youth groups on why studying survival skills is important (it's rated PG, meaning it should be suitable for all ages). There might be some controversy with the PETA supporters as it does show the two lead characters hunting animals for food; I guess that's the price you pay for realism. <img src="/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />