Review: Blood Glacier
Science magazine regularly covered a local environmental film festival in Washington DC every year. In 2014 I was assigned a rather unusual “environmental” film to review: Blood Glacier (Blutgletscher) [or The Station]. Marvin Kren, director. Allegro, Austria, 2013. 93 minutes.
Not an environmental disaster movie nor even a movie about the environment, Blood Glacier is an old-fashioned horror movie. A low-budget creature feature in the grand B movie tradition, it borrows liberally from the horror movie canon and relies on a positive overabundance of genre clichés. Its presence at an environmental film festival is surely an indication of the organizers' sense of humor.
A rather tenuous plot device links the retreat of glaciers to the appearance of a ghoulish horde of animal chimeras. A nondescript red microbe locked in the ice of a glacier high in the Alps is exposed as the ice melts, coloring the glacier. A small team of scientists working in a nearby climate-monitoring station discovers the microbe and then learns that local animals exposed to the microbe hybridize with their prey. A rift develops among the researchers about the significance of the discovery—does its scientific value outweigh the danger to society?—and how it might influence their future in the light of an imminent assessment visit by a government minister. Needless to say, their inaction leads to disaster. The monsters (which include a beetle-fox, an insect-ibex, and a bee-crow) begin to menace the scientists as well as the visiting government delegation.
Clearly made on the cheap, the movie has few computer-graphics effects. Most of the monsters are physical (and not always plausible) models. The plot is predictable, and the director falls back on "jump scares" and poorly lit scenes to draw out the horror. But for all its many failings, the film is not a failure. Gerhard Liebmann (the renegade scientist Janek) gives a performance far beyond the material's merit. Brigitte Kren (Minister Bodicek) is a delight to watch in her role as an older woman, taking control of the disastrous situation, saving those that she can, and marshaling the little eccentric band of survivors. The show's real star, though, is the location. Set high up among the mountains, the research station is surrounded by great piles of scree, rubble chewed up by the glaciers and laid bare by their retreat. It's a rugged, bony, and mostly lifeless place—unfriendly and unforgiving, a threat in and of itself to those that stray into it.
Perhaps the landscape is a metaphor for our effects on the world: It sometimes seems we are hell-bent on making our home a hostile, alien place, where monsters might well rise up out of the ground. In the final scene, our heroes fly to safety over one of the glaciers, stained red by the microbe, and just for a moment it looks like a vast and livid wound, as if Earth has been stabbed and its flesh laid open. This fleeting image is more disturbing, and more fittingly horrifying, than any other in the film.
First published in Science 09 May 2014: Vol. 344, Issue 6184, pp. 579-582
Copyright AAAS, 2014, all rights reserved.
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