My first reaction to viewing WHITEOUT was a very contemporary one. I opened up Twitter and lashed out: ''OMG, what a turd that was''. That reaction was met with about a dozen of red-flag comments from fans of WHITEOUT, the graphic novel written by Greg Rucka. I didn't know, but WHITEOUT is an adaptation! Now I've been there before and it's a slippery place. How do I honestly reviewed a movie I didn't like and thought I had clear reasons not to like without offending anybody? The worst possible sin of reviewing is to make people feel stupid for liking something. So how am I going to do that? You'll see...
Just as she's about to resign from her job in an international research station in freakin' Antarctica, U.S Marshal Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsdale), bodies start turning up. Winter is coming, the sun is about to set for a long, long time, the temperature is dropping and blizzards are about to hit. As the tormented Stetko investigates the first real major case to happen in Antarctica, she stumbles upon strange circumstances. A U.N inspector (Gabriel Macht) popping out of nowhere, a downed soviet plane and a mission chief who's getting increasingly nervous about this mess. Will the station get the best out of Stetko just at she was about to leave it behind?
Now, as I have previously said, I know nothing about the original material. Problem is, knowing there was a presumably great source material to such a clumsy movie changed the way I thought about it. What went wrong, exactly? The film is poorly constructed. I don't know how hard it's trying to cling to Greg Rucka's graphic novel *, but it contains several useless scenes where characters are lead by the events but don't develop and kind of relationship. Several scenes feel useless and mechanical. It's not like the plot was original enough to carry the weight here. It's pretty much your run-of-the-mill serial killer story, except that it's set in Antarctica. The pieces that tie the story together are obviously missing from the movie. The most intriguing, colourful scene involves a flashback and while it feels tacked on, I could see how it contributed to make Stetko a more engaging character.
HELLO, IT'S -50 OUTSIDE AND THESE GOGGLES ARE TOTALLY PROTECTING THE BOTTOM OF MY FACE.
There is the obvious Kate Beckinsdale issue also. Yeah, she's not the most talented actress but she can usually get by in the lonely, tortured professional part. Director Dominic Sena is not helping her credibility here, though. It's like he's trying to sell his crush on her rather than the actual story. There are long close-ups on her face, there is an annoying shower scene. Maybe Sena wanted to use Beckinsdale to obfuscate the fact that the supporting cast doesn't quite carry its own weight, but it was annoying.to have a director trying to sell you an actress and not the character.
I love the idea of facing your demons at the end of the world. Fuck, I went bonkers over THE GREY. It was a movie where character intimacy and action scenes were meshed together. What happened on screen was a direct evolution of what the character has been running towards. I'm sure the WHITEOUT graphic novel carries its narrative intent very well, but it was poorly translated to the movie. It had to be. Anyway, if WHITEOUT achieve anything, it's that it made me want to read the graphic novel to better understand what got lost in translation there. Because that movie is kind of a clunky turd, want it or not. There is no real way to avoid the truth about it.
* Which has several volumes. Considering a conventional screenplay has about 90 to 120 pages, it's impossible to do such art justice on the big screen.
