Eco-Horror Part II: The Thaw

This movie made weird choices. Not all of them were meant to be entertaining, but most of them were anyway.

The plot unfolds something like this: An Arctic research station finds a woolly mammoth in a melting glacier, and quickly discover the cause of it's death: a particularly ravenous parasite. What they decide to do next might permanently change the course of human life on this planet, as long as everything goes according to plan...

This movie stars Val Kilmer: But also, he's barely in the film. At the start of the film we watch his video-journal entry on the subject of their discovery, but he doesn't really show up again until much, much later.

This guy should have died three mins in.

Cross contamination? What's that?: Most of the people we see doing scientific work in the film are students, but between them there's almost zero understanding of what could contain a bug infestation. You'd think at least one of them must have lived somewhere where cockroaches were a problem, or had an entomology class, or even a minimum understanding of how air ducts work. But no, they all think doors will stop bugs from leaving a room, and it's hilarious.

Some interesting gore: In this otherwise tame movie there's some fun gross-out effects, not the least of which when they amputate someone's limb!

Well that escalated quickly: [SPOILERS] The original research team goes from "oh, a woolly mammoth" to "let's unleash the world's greatest plague" in record time. It's sort of a refreshing portrayal of eco-activists, where normally they'd be clueless tree-hugging-hippies or over-the-top characters of evil, but it really goes from zero to 60 in record time.

But did we like it?: It was entertaining, in a CW show kind of way.