Frozen
1/25/10
I had already been in line for 40 minutes before I saw the gushing quote from Harry Knowles on a miniposter someone was carrying around. So you’ll understand that I wasn’t about to give up, despite all signs indicating this would be a waste of time. I should have listened to my instincts.
I don’t mean to be harsh, but, this is really just one of those movies that I wanted to know the ending of, and nothing more. And it would have been successful if it had gotten straight to the point—just show me how these 3 kids, stuck on a ski lift when the lodge closes for 5 days, stay alive (or don’t). An 8 minutes short, yes. A 90 minute feature? No.
It was an admirable effort to set up empathetic characters with backstories, and foreshadow the events to come. But really, everybody in the theater just wants to know how they die. We don’t need half an hour of dialogue that sounds like a Kevin Smith first draft. (And you’ve seen his final drafts, so you know what I mean.)
One common tenet taught in screenwriting classes is: Avoid stagnant locations where there’s nothing for the characters to do. Cars, bars, restaurants, ski lifts. All they can do is talk. And talking is boring. Especially in a so-called horror movie. Writer/Director Adam Green wrote himself into a corner by trapping these “kids” (20 years olds played by 30 years olds—why is this always the case?) in a singular location, left to make pop culture references and get in heated, overacted arguments. We don’t care about that. We want to see horrific things happen to these people.
However, even the gnarliest of outcomes isn’t so bad. In the world of Frozen, everything that can go wrong on a ski lift (and then some) does go wrong. But only for a few minutes—then everyone magically seems to regenerate their stamina or mental health or the skin on their hands. No problems last much longer than the next scene, when a new hazard takes precedence. Show me the compounded impact of wolves and frostbite and broken bones, not just one at a time. Then I might care.
Then again, when the emotional climax of your film is somebody crying over pissing their pants, you’ve got bigger problems to handle.
