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Iceman (1984) **1/2
Director: Fred Schwepisi
Starring: Timothy Hutton, John Lone, Lindsay Crouse, Josef Sommer, David Strathairn
I’m told that this dated drama has somehow managed to gain a small cult following over the last quarter century, but I am at a loss to explain why. The acting is very good, particularly John Lone in the title role, and the characters are cardboard cut-outs, but not poor ones, though I think the Iceman would have been better without such a similar cultural mindset to our own. The story is the weak link in this missing link story. It starts out far-fetched, which for an older sci-fi feature, I am willing to accept, but, while this script gives us a decent second act, the third act gets increasingly hard to buy. The ending is a love-it-or-hate-it point of debate among viewers. I have to sit myself down with the latter group.
Timothy Hutton is Shepard, an anthropologist studying the Inuit from an elaborate scientific base in the arctic, when a perfectly preserved 40,000 year old Neanderthal is discovered nearby and brought in. This is already a huge discovery, but it gets just a little bigger when they find that they are able to revive him! Ok, ok I know that’s a stretch, but it is a sci-fi movie so what the hell. The science here is pretty shaky, but John Lone is not, playing the world’s oldest man as he tries to adapt to the crazy world around him. Look for an early Danny Glover role and some really head-scratching plot shifts.
Starts out far-fetched and gets further-fetched. The science was shaky when the movie was made and twenty-five years later its a food processor on high. Get past that and you might find enjoy it on TV. Then, you can tell me what you thought of that ending.
