Arctic Apocalypse is a 2019 thriller about a new ice age that forces a family to make their way across the frozen landscape before it’s too late.
Disaster movies get a bad rap. And most deserve it. Few do anything but depend on extravagant and expensive computer-assisted visual effects to tap into our more baser fears (and pleasures) in bringing the goods. But at least they have that. Directors Eric Paul Erickson and Jon Kondelik‘s new film Arctic Apocalypse, doesn’t, the low budget endeavor earnest in its efforts to sort of retell a story we’ve already seen before, but unable to make its visuals or story look or feel remotely authentic, leaving this a source for some giggles maybe but not much more.
I’ll keep this brief. A storm sinks the Northern Hemisphere under a devastating wave of ice and snow, New York City entirely buried under a super fast moving glacier. While people rush to evacuate, Mark (Joel Berti) and his wife Helen (Jennifer Lee Wiggins) go on the hunt for their daughter Brie (Lauren Esposito) and her boyfriend Tyler (Charles N. Townsend III), lost in the wilds when they are forced to abandon their car.
Relying heavily on what looks like stock footage and unfinished CGI, Arctic Apocalypse is Z-grade from the start, which would be with most movies, just the thing for some good times at least. However, the filmmakers take all of this far too seriously, and while the story at least is absurd enough to be goofily enjoyable, it has no campiness in its delivery to be what it should. It’s a common problem in this arena, filmmakers with a vision well out of reach financially to make it work ending up having their movies tumble under the weight of truly bad special effects. Not to mention loose acting and generic writing.
Maybe that’s what Erickson and Kondelik are after, purposefully layering all this in gobs of bland cheese, hoping to get attention for being notoriously bad. Look what that did for the Sharknado franchise (which this movie gives a not so subtle nod to), where logic be damned in the name of astronomical incredulity rules the day. But when that standard is where you’re aiming, well, I mean, what can we expect? This, I guess.
With basic science blissfully tossed out the window and no sense of a global scale to the weather’s extreme vengeance (despite a few grey and snow-swirled images, like that of a rattled Eiffel Tower), this is mostly about a few trapped youngsters sitting in a room waiting for rescue. With painted styrofoam standing in as walls of ice and overly forced dramatic moments with a pack of toothy wolves, there’s nothing in all of this that lends itself to any investment, which is too bad because, as Roland Emmerich‘s 2004 The Day After Tomorrow already revealed, some eye-rolling fun can be had in the deep snow. Feeling a decade out of date, preposterous to a degree – but probably not enough – and lacking greater substance, this is a lifeless effort with not much reason to exist, though ironically perhaps, that’s most likely why it will gain a few die hard fans.