Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997)

Awesome Movie

Absolutely brilliant

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Smilla Jaspersen (Julia Ormond) is a loner living in Copenhagen who befriends a young Inuit boy from Greenland. He's unwanted and one day he falls off the roof of their apartment to his death. Nobody cares except Smilla. Only her sense of snow convinces her that he was murdered. Her investigation dives deeper and deeper into intrigue and danger.This has great atmosphere. I absolutely love the desolate tone of the snowy north and of Smilla's life. Julia Ormond really personify the iciness of this world. It's moodiness really pushing the story into a great mystery. But it does get into unrealistic territory. It's not so much a mystery rather as an action adventure. The ending in the ice really made the whole thing too outlandish. The mood of the earlier parts are lost.

I haven't read the novel, though I'm afraid I can imagine it being superior to this. Honestly, I've been putting off watching this for years. It's cool that a Dane wrote it, and that another one directed it. And it was actually partially filmed here, as well as, unusually, up in Greenland, and a little bit of Inuktitut is spoken. It just doesn't feel like much of anything was beefed up for the purpose of putting it up on the silver screen, and the fact of the matter is, it has to be bigger than it does on the page. As far as what is translated from the book goes, the mystery does work well. It is fairly engaging, and keeps you guessing to an extent. With that said, you know who's behind it the moment you see him, since *the score instantly becomes ominous when the camera shows him*. This has its entertaining moments, and occasional humor. The performances are great, though these talented actors have all done better work elsewhere. Ormond fails to make the character particularly likable, and her accent does not convince. Editing and cinematography are nice enough. There is infrequent strong language, some violence and a sex scene in this. I recommend this to big fans of those involved in its production. 6/10

Julia Ormond can be a chameleon in her different roles. She can change her looks and persona until you don't seem to recognize her from role to role. Here she has rather short straight black hair and lots of eye makeup to make her pass for half Eskimo (sorry P.C. Police, Inuit).I was fascinated by her character, Smilla Jasperson, a socially inept mathematician and researcher who cares for no one until her neighbor's young child awakens her maternal instincts. The fact that Smilla is freakin gorgeous never seems to occur to anyone but her creepy neighbor who lives in her apartment building on the floor below.Smilla walks home from work one day, doubtless to avoid contact with anyone on public transportation. An ambulance passes her and stops at her apartment building. Her young friend Isaiah has fallen to his death from the roof of their apartment building. Smilla instinctively knows that this was no accident and sets out to find out who caused his death and why.Smilla needs financial help to pursue her investigation. She turns to her father Moritz Jasperson, a prominent and wealthy physician. The horribly miscast Robert Loggia portrays her indulgent father who enjoys the company of a wife younger than his daughter. The two women detest each other intensely. I suspect that the reason Moritz gives Smilla money so readily is to get the two women apart as soon as possible.The film offers some very interesting background scenes from Copenhaven as Smilla pursues her investigation. When Smilla calls on Elsa Lubing, a former accountant for Greenland Mining Corporation, she starts to see where to concentrate her efforts.Here we are treated to the typical Hollywood hatred and disdain for Christian belief. Elsa Lubing is a total whack job who only reveals what she knows after accidentally reading a passage of scripture that seems to indicate the justice of Smilla's quest.Smilla always seems to meet strangers that are willing to provide any required information or other support to prevent failure in her quest. This just-in-time altruism occurs repeatedly in the plot and quickly becomes grating. The screenwriters have obviously become too lazy to generate a more plausible flow of events.The plot quickly falls into the tired path of a virtuous investigator battling sinister and mysterious forces eager to silence them. I enjoyed seeing Julia take on the unfamiliar role of physical action heroine. She is involved in bomb explosions, car chases, break-ins, and many narrow escapes from capture or death. I especially enjoyed her confrontation with her snotty younger-than-her step mother. Julia did a lot of these stunts herself, you can always tell when they sneak in a stunt double.Smilla's quest takes her to Greenland aboard a ship chartered by the sinister Greenland Mining Corporation. She has managed to land a crew berth on the mess deck. It was interesting to watch Julia actually scale the side of the ship on a rope ladder. You can tell it was really her doing this fairly dangerous feat. The crew of the ship seems strangely indifferent to the presence of a gorgeous young woman aboard. After a brief confrontation in the crew quarters, no one takes much notice of her presence. Sailors have changed a lot since my Navy days!Well, they actually filmed in Greenland rather than faking it on a sound stage. That was about the high point of the last half of the film. The plot was so weak, contrived, implausible, etc. that it was hard to sustain any interest in watching the pitiful climax.This film lost its way about 1/3 through the runtime. I must rate this film the second worst Julia Ormond film role I have seen. The worst has to be her portrayal of a con artist in 'The Prime Gig'.

Parts were good but does not stand up on the whole. Very unrealistic and un-researched, asking the audience to swallow a lot of basic inconsistent crap, something that would get most continuity people fired in today's market. Eg. Why are they simply standing around an un-fenced off pool of deadly organisms in a pristine lab setting, not to mention that it's surrounded by slippery ice. Also, what was this GM's crime anyway? (He was likely doing what would have been done anyway by his own employees but with government regulation and observation.) The infection of the boy was not intentional. Not disclosing it was illegal but the child was treated/observed. Nowhere in this film is it mentioned or even properly implied that the boy might have been an experiment or that treatment was withheld purposefully so that they could watch the organism evolve in a human subject. It was implied though that the disease was untreatable and fatal in every case, that to disturb the "worm" was to invite catastrophe. That the boy was necessarily misused was not clear at all. Nor was it necessarily communicated that any kind of haste or greed was ultimately responsible for what happened, not at all. Director and screenwriter were asking a lot of the audience that should have been delivered by them. This also struck me as an exercise of moralization by people who were over their heads in the subject matter and taking their first run at it, making a lot of mistakes along the way and aimed at an audience whose level of candor/maturity was not up to the more rigorous detail and syllogisms of genuine ethical debate.Gave me a large headache.