6.9 | / 10 |
Users | 4.6 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.7 |
A U.S. Naval submarine team races the Soviets to a remote outpost in the North Pole to recover some top-secret satellite photography.
Starring: Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Patrick McGoohan, Jim Brown, Tony BillThriller | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Action | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.19:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.20:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: Dolby Digital 2.0
Spanish: Dolby Digital Mono
English SDH, French, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 1.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
I grew up in the mountains outside of Salt Lake City and my parents’ house had a rather precipitous rock strewn cliff
that rose up next to our driveway. When I was probably eight or nine a buddy of mine came over to play and started
laying out a scenario of us being “good guy” Americans who had to climb the rock wall to take a "German fortress" that
was supposedly at the top of the cliff. He looked straight at me and told me the name of the game was The Guns of
Navarone. Now I was young and wasn’t especially tuned in to either the literary or cinematic world at that age and
didn’t realize at the time that he had obviously seen the movie on television (probably the night before) and was acting
out what he had just witnessed. I however thought that the game’s name was really weird sounding, and some time
later, when I did become aware of the film, everything clicked into place and I had a hearty laugh. Years later
as a kind of geeky teenager I joined a book club and started reading a lot of Alistair MacLean’s novels. I found them
brisk and exciting, with some nice tangential historical elements and some great set pieces. MacLean had his first brush
with major mainstream prominence with The Guns of Navarone, and once the film adaptation proved to be such
an overwhelming success, his books became hot properties in Hollywood. While 1965’s The Satan Bug had a
rather tenuous connection to its MacLean source novel, it took until 1968, some seven years after The Guns of
Navarone debuted in theaters, for another big budget action adventure film based on a best selling MacLean novel
to hit the screen.
While this adaptation too strayed from MacLean’s original conception, Ice Station Zebra
attempted to blend some of the action adventure elements of The Guns of Navarone with the espionage
environment of The Satan Bug. The film might have worked as a smaller scale psychological thriller, but
someone at MGM decided this was the perfect property for what was then already a dying breed, the big budget
roadshow engagement. Ice Station Zebra was marketed as the “big” MGM picture of the year, while another
MGM attraction that was initially derided but soon applauded as an all-time classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey,
turned out to be the film everyone was talking about. (In many markets, MGM attempted to draw people to Ice
Station Zebra after its roadshow engagements by exhibiting it in a double feature with 2001: A Space
Odyssey, certainly not a match
made in theatrical heaven.) Ice Station Zebra is kind of a lumbering behemoth of a film, way too big for its own
good, That said, it has an effective opening act that at least partially makes up for a lethargic denouement that plays
more like filler than thriller.
Ice Station Zebra is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Warner Brothers with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.19:1. This Super Panavision 70 feature looks fantastically sharp and well detailed on Blu-ray, as most of these larger format features usually do. Colors are beautifully saturated and robust, and the image has a startling clarity that benefits from extremely good contrast and solid black levels. This high definition presentation does reveal some of the "seams" of the special effects (the opening sequence featuring the satellite suffers, especially in the scene where it parachutes into the clouds), and some of the underwater photography, while undeniably impressive, is understandably softer and less detailed than the "surface level" sequences. Despite the many scenes featuring blizzard like conditions, there are no issues with the image not resolving correctly.
Ice Station Zebra features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix that presents Michel Legrand's boisterous score in all its majextic beauty. The surround activity here is kind of interesting, in that so much of the film (at least in the first half) takes place in the enclosed confines of the nuclear submarine, so instead of incredibly immersive activity, we're instead offered very nicely albeit pretty subtly placed effects, with a radar "blip" on the left channel or the sound of an engine rumbling through the rear channels. Things open up considerably in the arctic second half, where the storm sounds whip through the surrounds quite convincingly. There is quite a bit of LFE on display here, including an explosion or two and a couple of incidents of gunfire. Dialogue is cleanly and clearly presented and the mix is extremely well prioritized.
Ice Station Zebra is one of those "glass half full, glass half empty" situations (with or without ice cubes). The first half or so of the film is exciting, well paced and features well drawn characters and good plot machinations. But once we get to those studio bound arctic sets, everything melts into a pretty sickly puddle, like an ice floe under the assault of global warming. Fans of the film (and there are many) will no doubt love this Blu-ray's superior video and audio, and for them I certainly heartily recommend this release. For the public at large, though, this is better seen as a perfect symbol of a dinosaur somehow showing up when its big budget roadshow engagement kin had largely become extinct.
1980
1968
The Great Spy Mission / Warner Archive Collection
1965
1983
1967
1959
1997
1977
1990
2013
Limited Edition
1969
1965
Special Edition
1958
2014
Saboteur: Code Name Morituri | Limited Edition to 3000
1965
Warner Archive Collection
1955
2019
2017
1990
1967