Against the Ice

The Gist: Ejnar Mikkelsen (Coster-Waldau) clods back to the ice-locked vessel Alabama with Jorgensen (Gisli Orn Gardarsson) stretched out on the dogsled.

There’s nothing unexpected out there for Ejnar and Iver to run into – just wind, wind, wind, a polar bear, wind, more wind and even more wind followed by wwwwinnndd, and the polar bear scenes stir up more unintended laughter than a sense of peril. For Ejnar and Iver, the days plod on uber-dramatically or uber-undramatically, and there isn’t a whole lot of meat on their bones personality-wise; they talk vaguely about missing women but otherwise don’t reveal much about themselves besides a Iver’s slightly unexpected durability and Ejnar’s slightly unexpected irrationality. It’s the type of journey where you will have to kill one of the dogs to feed the other dogs. It’s his patriotic duty to go back for it, but considering Jorgensen’s fate, he has no takers for a partner – except Iver Iverson (Joe Cole), a greenhorn who’s never earned his stripes as a selfless explorer who might also have to be a complete moron to embark on a grueling months-long expedition for the sake of the accuracy of some lines on a map. Ejnar is the Alabama’s captain, and he and his crew are on a rescue mission. He found the explorers’ bodies, but not their data, which, per adventurer protocol, is stuck in a pile of rocks somewhere on a sheet of ice.

The 'Game of Thrones' actor co-wrote and stars in the film, which tells the story of real-life explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen.

Following in the footsteps of a failed expedition, Mikkelsen’s mission was more than just vanity. And he has so little respect for the idea that someone would know better.” "Here it was very clear. “That was insane. You need each other," he says. “I like these stories about going to the unknown. “We shot in a hurricane. "All of us have this curiosity: what’s around the next corner? It’s also his weakness because he’s so single-minded. We were evacuated from a glacier. Perhaps it takes a certain insanity to get a film like this in the can — and to understand the mentality of a character like Ejnar Mikkelsen. In this case, Flinth and his team shot in Iceland and Greenland, a country with little in the way of infrastructure to accommodate film crews.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau co-wrote and stars in this beautifully shot, well-performed, historical survival drama that serves its purpose well.

Against the Ice inhabits the middle of the spectrum, better than many and worse than others. Aspects of the storytelling feel inspired by pulp novels, and the film's version of planting and payoff is a bit elementary. It was filmed on location in Greenland and Iceland, and that commitment to the setting makes a lot of it a treat to look at. The frustrating thing about discussing Against the Ice is that it's extremely well put together, and many people clearly put in an immense amount of work to get it made, but there just isn't much there. The tale is adapted for the screen by Joe Derrick and Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who also portrays Mikkelsen, and is directed by Peter Flinth. Retelling the story with a level of grounded accuracy has been a time-honored tradition in film, but not every story makes the jump perfectly.

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For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times podcast with Jane Garvey. Against the Ice is streaming on Netflix now. That was instead the work of another Danish explorer by the name of Johan Peter Koch.

Danish explorers set out to map the landscape (and thus prove the Americans wrong) on what was called the “Denmark Expedition.” Tragically, the expedition ended ...

This map proved that the supposed Peary Channel didn’t exist, making the American claim to Peary Land invalid. “He was a dear friend and fine explorer,” Mikkelsen said. In the early 1900s, much of Greenland was still uncharted.