Mar. 13th, 2021

galadhir: a blue octopus sits in a golden armchair reading a black backed novel (Terror under the ice)
A friend on Tumblr just asked me what I thought of The Terror, and whether I'd recommend it. I wrote an enormous screed in return, and I'm going to repost it here so - if anyone here is wondering whether to watch The Terror, I won't have to type it all twice :)

I would definitely recommend it. The only thing against it is that it requires a fair tolerance toward gore, because there's quite a bit of people having their heads or other parts bitten off by a huge ice-bear-spirit. But this is not one of those programs where you feel have a kind of weird fetishistic enjoyment of the gore. People dying is always treated as a tragedy and with a kind of gentleness toward human fraility, that to my mind makes the gore tolerable

I didn't find it too scary - and I am someone who had to stop watching Supernatural because I found that too scary. I know I'm not invading someone else's land or (accidentally) shooting vengeful shamans, and therefore I can be fairly happy that a giant remorseless, unstoppable ice-bear-spirit is not coming for me.

I don't know if you watched Stargate Universe at all, but this has a similar vibe of an isolated crew of social misfits faced with an outside threat, and you gradually get to know people and love them as they gradually get to know and love each other.

It helps that the very first scene is of the search party learning from the local Inuit that everyone in the crew is dead. You don't get your hopes up wanting your fave to survive - the most you can hope for is that they get a good, or at least painlessly quick death. But tbh, death doesn't seem too bad by the time it comes for most of them.

So those are my caveats. Mostly though, it's cinematically beautiful to look at, and its study of human frailty and the kindness and love that are needed to deal with it are complex and worth thinking about. The Inuit are treated with respect and I think were involved in the production, so their viewpoint is a fascinating counterpoint to that of the doomed westerners

(All these guys staggering around and starving in the middle of the main female character's country, where she can just step off the boat and build herself a house and she's right at home.)
But the commentary on colonialism is also light handed and done with kindness

There are a lot of characters who it's difficult to keep track of, but I stan for Captain Crozier, everyone on earth loves Goodsir, and I loathe Hickey with all the force of loathing available to me, but nobody could claim he was not memorable :)
.... Already too late to cut a long story short, but I think it's brilliant and I would definitely recommend it

Oh, what is it about? It's about the Franklin expedition to try to find the North West passage through the Arctic. The two ships get frozen into the ice for three years and the crews eventually try to make it home by walking... That's all a true story, but in this telling there is also a giant polar-bear spirit which wants them gone from the lands that belong to the people it protects. The spirit is tied to a shaman who can control it, but the expedition accidentally shoots the shaman, and his daughter isn't ready to take up control of it because she's scared of it herself. She eventually has to face it and then decide what to do about all these white men going mad and feral all over the place

The female characters in the TV show are treated with respect throughout. (Unlike in the freaking book, whose author I would not like to meet.)

~

Incidentally, my DW's subtitle is a quote from a specially horrifying and yet moving scene in The Terror, and the deep abyss theme is because I was so impressed with a scene where one of the characters goes down into the ocean under the ice. Probably my favourite scene, because it's so beautiful, so eerie and so scary all at once.

I need an icon of that, don't I?

April 2025

S M T W T F S
   12345
678910 1112
13141516171819
2021 2223242526
27282930   

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 8th, 2025 02:50 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios