Ice Station Zebra

Finding Ice Station Zebra on the library shelf, we wondered why an old action movie like this had been long forgotten.  Just look at the poster!  John Sturges, director of The Great Escape and Bad Day at Black Rock.  Jim Brown with a rifle.  Nuclear submarines and gun battles at the North Pole.  This has promise.  You’d think it’d be a staple of Saturday afternoon TV, like Conan the Barbarian and First Blood.

But this movie is a pompous exercise in blockbuster action.  It starts with the prelude.  Whenever a movie makes you sit through five minutes of its score at the beginning, it’d better be good.  No go here.

Then Rock Hudson appears on-screen, and the entire thing falls apart.  It makes sense that the most famous thing this guy is known for is getting AIDS.  He’s a Cary Grant lookalike with no charisma.  Put him in the confined space of a nuclear submarine, and everybody in the audience feels like getting out real quick.

The movie has one excellent sequence in which the submarine plunges towards the depths.  If you have seen Das Boot, or any other submarine movie, you will have seen something similar.  The plot of this movie is not worth mentioning, except that the submarine at one point is sabotaged, only we NEVER find out who sabotaged it.  Huh?  We stopped watching this one at the intermission.  Yes, it has an intermission, which is an invitation to leave if you so choose.  That’s probably why there are no more intermissions in movies.

Entertainment: 4

Intelligence: 0

Morality: not worth bothering about