Ice Station Zebra

Annotation for KRRR! 2012 by Marie Barešová

A module from a Soviet space satellite crashes somewhere beyond the Arctic Circle. The situation is monitored by both Soviet and American control centers. Meanwhile, a devastating fire breaks out under unclear circumstances at the British weather station Zebra. Several survivors are waiting to be rescued, and it is clear that if help does not reach them as quickly as possible, they will die of cold and hunger. An ice storm rages over the North Pole, making airstrikes impossible. Therefore, Captain James Ferraday (Rock Hudson), commander of an American nuclear submarine, is assigned the rescue mission. The instructions for the mission come from the highest places, so the captain quickly realizes that saving a few civilians will not be the only goal of this dangerous operation. The viewer does not penetrate the psychology of the characters, the individual actors suspect each other, speak to each other in riddles and hide their motivations. The narrative flows slowly and builds on an atmosphere of constant threat. The tension is also heightened by the fact that the men share a clearly defined space that cannot be left. The first half of the film is a submarine drama, while the second part takes us to the weather station and its immediate surroundings. The special visual effects (an Oscar nominee in competition with the winning 2001: A Space Odyssey) are unlikely to impress anyone today, and the landscape at the pole is made up of unconvincing ice and snow, but the spectacular shots of the submarine sailing under the ice floes make good use of the wide-angle format.

The 1968 film was based on a novel by Scottish writer Alistair MacLean, an author of thrillers and adventure stories. For his novel Ice Station Zebra (1963), MacLean was inspired by the atmosphere of the Cold War, which escalated in the first half of the 1960s. The author pitted the two main actors of this crisis against each other, using both the contemporary fascination with nuclear submarines and weapons and the motif of the intensively ongoing space program, another area of ​​American-Soviet rivalry. Filmmakers often touched on the Cold War theme, and the 1960s were an era of spy thrillers and Bond films. After all, the character of British secret agent 007 is reminiscent of Jones (Patrick McGoohan), one of the main characters in the spy drama Ice Station Zebra. The American film was directed by John Sturges, director of other well-known genre titles, such as the western The Magnificent Seven (1960) and the war film The Great Escape (1963).