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Friday, February 17, 2006
'Eight Below' warms the heart despite faux paws
The outdoor adventure, "Eight Below," is an Americanized remake of the 1983 Japanese movie, "Antarctica," which told the true story of a pack of huskies that somehow managed to survive a brutal winter by themselves at Japan's East Antarctica station in 1957.
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View all photosThe original film, which actually was shot in Antarctica, had human characters but was primarily a documentarylike canine survival story that imagined the ingenious ways the stranded dogs might have survived all those months without food or shelter.
This Disney remake follows the same track, but it gives us a much more abbreviated account of the sled dogs' adventure on the ice, and instead asks us to identify with the dogs' caretaker (Paul Walker), a tracker forced by circumstances to abandon his beloved animals.
The movie is more the story of how, once back in the States, the guilt-ridden, obsessed protagonist moves heaven and earth to try to return to the bottom of the world and rescue his dogs, even when the severity of the winter makes his quest seem insane.
Serious Antarctica buffs may want to throw stones at the B.C.-filmed epic, since it absurdly climaxes with a series of midwinter adventures that take place in balmy, blazing daylight at a time the real place is locked in round-the-clock darkness and temperatures of 140 degrees below.
But director Frank Marshall otherwise manages to tell his story with a minimum of nonsense, the dog actors will melt your heart, and hunky Walker (whose name is usually a guarantee of a bad movie) is surprisingly compelling as the film's driven, loner hero.
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