Ice Road Truckers: The Complete Season Four Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.0

Ice Road Truckers: The Complete Season Four Blu-ray Movie Review

Forget about climate change, what about channel change?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 16, 2011

Is it a bad thing to occasionally cheer on climate change and global warming? Probably not, but you might be forgiven if you wonder, however jokingly, what the television landscape might be like if there were no longer frozen tundras, frost covered lakes, and the other terrors which haunt Ice Road Truckers, which is seeing its fourth season released on Blu-ray. This is yet another A&E History Channel series which virtually has “niche” scrawled across its Mac hemi, and it can’t be denied that the show has had its interesting elements, especially with regard to the human stories of some of its drivers. Ice Road Truckers may not be made for the long haul, however, as it seems increasingly tired and predictable as it continues down the snowy roads close to the Arctic Circle in this fourth season. Despite the introduction of a couple of new drivers, and the continuing sagas of a handful of others whom the show’s regular audience has come to know well, the show just sort of meanders along this season, with the typical supposed life-threatening dangers around every ice-strewn corner, and the usual (and usually more interesting) personal stories of some of these stalwart loners.

Part of the problem with Ice Road Truckers, as it is for so many of these ostensible “reality” shows built around interesting professions or a group of supposedly interesting people (think Housewives) is that one can’t help but feel a lot of what we’re seeing is, if not scripted, at least perhaps shall we say “discussed beforehand.” This show features so many near misses, faux arguments and not exactly natural feeling interactions in this fourth season that any sense of reality is hobbled if not outright destroyed. There’s little question these are heroic people, at least in their own way. They no doubt risk their lives, at least in theory, driving the insanely primitive highways and byways of the Dalton Highway and its offshoots, and this season does show some extremely precarious moves, including gigantic, heavily laden trucks inching over frozen rivers and lakes. But more and more as this show has gone on (and on), events simply seem too manufactured. The worst example of this prefab mentality is a really uncomfortable scene where a trucker is hoping to scatter the ashes of his deceased father out on the frozen tundra, when another trucker, supposedly unaware of what’s going on, zooms by in his truck, which the grieving son finds disrespectful. If the ensuing interchange isn’t exactly cut from Housewives cloth, it’s still unconvincing and a troubling development for a show which has had more of a real-life working class ethos going for it.

As with previous seasons, the strength of the show, despite its exotic setting and at least passingly interesting premise, is the drivers themselves. Several drivers of Season Three are back, including Lisa, Jack, Hugh and Alex. Two new guys, Ray and Greg, also join the fray this season, and part of Season Four’s overall arc includes these newbies trying to outdo the veterans in the number of hauls they can complete before the season ends and the “roads” melt before the drivers’ very eyes. One of the sort of odd parts of the entire Ice Road Truckers franchise is this sort of game show ambience where the drivers vie to see who will be dubbed King of the Loads, to coin a phrase. While it gives some drama and momentum to the enterprise, it also seems increasingly manufactured, especially when drivers supposedly become reckless in order to win.

Once again, as with last season, the most fun driver is Lisa Kelly, the young woman from Wasilla, Alaska, who alludes to that city’s most famous resident while also sounding a lot like Ms. Palin much of the time, with typically dropped “g”’s at the end of words. Lisa stands out not simply because of her gender, but simply because she’s almost intentionally over aggressive at times, as if to prove she’s capable of handling the big rigs along with the big boys. Speaking of the boys, there are no really compelling stories here, despite several manufactured “throw downs”, with the one interesting element being the almost thrown away sidebar of the trucker scattering his father’s ashes, alluded to above.

Ice Road Truckers still does a very good job of exploiting the frozen yet somehow hypnotically beautiful wilderness in these northernmost climes. Great footage of blizzards, windstorms, and avalanches augments the more standard fare of shots of trucks driving down long icy passages. The series also holds some passing interest as it visits little out of the way villages off of the “beaten track” (if it can even be called that) of the Dalton Highway. It’s almost incredible to see the primitive living conditions some people willingly endure, and this season’s one really strong calling card is its foray into previously unexplored territory.

Certainly every show that’s ever made it to air has a shelf life, and it’s not unusual for a series to outstay its “sell by” date, sometimes by several years. The problem with Ice Road Truckers is it’s so narrowly focused that there’s no opportunity to stretch the boundaries of the format and give viewers anything new or unexpected. Introducing a new driver or two just simply doesn’t provide enough variety or contrast to keep this series as interesting and innovative as it seemed for its first season or so. There are only so many times the portentous narrator can warn of imminent danger (which of course never amounts to more than a momentary scare or inconvenience), and only so many times we can watch the same route being traveled over and over again, until it’s impossible not to feel we’ve been through one long haul too many.

Ice Road Truckers: The Complete Season Four features these sixteen episodes spread over four Blu-ray discs:

Breaking Through
The Polar Bear Returns
Facing Down the Blow
Monster Storm Over Atigun
Trapped on Thin Ice
Danger at 55 Below
Avalanche!
Lisa’s Monster Megahaul
Blood on the Dalton
The Ace vs. The Ice
A Rookie’s Nighmare
The Dalton Strikes Back
Convoy to Hell
A Legend Meets His End
Deadly Melt
New King of the Dalton

Ice Road Truckers: The Complete Season Four Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Ice Road Truckers: The Complete Season Four trundles onto Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1. This season doesn't pop quite the way previous seasons have on Blu-ray, and the 1080i presentation has some persistent combing artifacts which may bother the more sensitive viewers. As with previous seasons, there is also occasional stock footage utilized which is obviously not from hi-def source elements. Also as in previous seasons, some of the interior cab footage has been shot in extremely low lighting situations, and the resultant image is grainy and very soft. On the plus side, there's a lot of breathtaking scenery here, and though the palette is cast mostly in hues of white and beige due to the northern climes, the image has a decent amount of fine detail.

Ice Road Truckers: The Complete Season Four Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Ice Road Truckers: The Complete Season Four comes with a generally respectable lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix. This series consists largely of narration intercut with the frequent "confessional" segments with the drivers and the shots of the trucks carefully zooming to and fro, so there really isn't a lot of opportunity for thrilling surround activity. Therefore, the 2.0 mix suffices handily, with excellent fidelity and some nice robust low end which is represented mostly in the throbbing engines of these monster trucks. All of the narration (as hyperbolic as it typically is) and the truckers' commentaries are presented cleanly and clearly, and the ubiquitous sound effects are also well mixed into the proceedings.

Ice Road Truckers: The Complete Season Four Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Bonus Footage (SD; 18:26). Disc Four of this set comes with a brief collection of extra segments not seen in the original broadcast version, including longer introductions of the two new drivers.

Ice Road Truckers: The Complete Season Four Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Is it possible for an ice road trucker to jump the shark? The fact is this series has simply been down the same icy road too many times and for too long. The series may still hold some interest for longtime fans, but it's beginning to feel awfully stale and rote.