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An expedition team led by Choe Do-hyung (Song Kang-ho) marches on toward the Antarctic Point of Inaccessibility, one of the most difficult places to reach on the planet Earth, and trodden upon only once by a Soviet team in 1958. Min-jae (Yu Ji-tae), formally trained in mountain climbing at Switzerland and in awe of the charismatic Do-hyung, is joined by the bookish navigator Young-min (Park Hee-soon), the rather thuggish but sharp communications expert Seong-hoon (Yun Je-moon), the genial cook Geun-chan (Kim Kyung-ik) and the electronics specialist Jae-kyung (Choe Deok-moon). When Min-jae discovers an old journal left by a British expedition 80 years ago, he begins to notice odd parallels between the journal entries and his team's experience.

Antarctic Journal had been a long-gestating pet project for the young director Im Pil-sung, whose short films including Baby (1999) and Souvenir (1997) received much critical kudos. I had been hearing rumors about the alleged brilliance of Im's screenplay (revised with input from director Bong Joon-ho and writer Lee Hae-joon) for several years. The big-budget production (8.5 billion won in total) set a new precedent for collaboration between Korean and New Zealand cinema industries. Despite the high expectation, however, the movie had a disappointing domestic run, contributing to the latest industry wagging about the decline of so-called star power in Korean cinema.

Antarctic Journal has its share of problems but neither its stars nor its technical staff can really be blamed for them. While the character of Do-hyung is certainly not a stretch acting-wise for Song Kang-ho, he still does an excellent job in communicating the man's mental breakdown, mostly with subtly vacant stares and ill-timed smiles: there is no spittle-flying historionics. Yu Ji-tae presents a credible audience identification figure, whose faith in human reason and decency becomes severely tested. The rest of the team members are played by capable, theater-trained actors, making the most out of sometimes unevenly distributed dialogues and scenes.

Director Im Pil-sung, aided by DP Jeong Jeong-hoon (Sympathy for Lady Vengeance) and editor Kim Min-seon, makes striking use of the 2.35:1 scope screen. Sometimes two characters enter into a conversation while occupying extreme right and left corners of the screen, leaving a stretch of white space in the middle, signifying a distance that cannot be breached by communication. There are poetically beautiful but unnerving moments such as a beam of sunlight that pours into the makeshift tent, seemingly taking on the solidity of a pole made of golden glass. The film also includes some very impressive set pieces, most notably those involving ice crevices. Kawai Kenji's (Chaos, Ghost in the Shell) score is exceedingly effective in musically evoking the eerie atmosphere of Antarctica, simultaneously cold and intimate, and Dong-hyun's grim and relentless drive.

Regrettably, Antarctic Journal never makes up its mind about whether to stick to genre conventions or not. Is the film a new sack filled with old wine, an exotic update of true and tried horror cliches, perhaps a snowbound R-Point or a retread of John Carpenter's Thing (1982)? Or is it primarily a psychological thriller, the real horrors generated by the team members' paranoia and self-possession? Or is it a human drama, which explores the innate insanity of the "can-do" spirit that propel Korean "leaders" like Do-hyung toward his goal, with the bloody and torn bodies of his "family" strewn along the path? Antarctic Journal is a little bit of all of the above, but these elements never congeal into a coherent shape.

True, the fact that the audience does not receive sufficient "exposition" about what exactly is going on is in itself not such a serious problem. The real issue is that the film's mysteries are neither grounded in its characters nor anchored in its narrative design: we are given a lot of pieces of puzzle, which refuse to add up to a picture. To give but one example, what the heck is that white figure clearly recorded by a video camera but which no character seems to be aware of? What about the ghost from Do-hyung's past: is it really a dead spirit, or a projection of his guilty psyche? It eventually becomes tiresome to try to "figure" all these things out on your own. I can imagine many Korean viewers, expecting all the loose ends to be somehow tied up at the end, even if it involves a ridiculous deus ex machina ("It was all a dream! They never left the camp!"), groaning in frustration and getting up in a huff as the end credits roll.

Antarctic Journal contains enough impressive visuals and solid performances (not to mention Kawai's bone-chilling music score) to be worthwhile for viewers with an open mind and penchant for spectacles. Those who perhaps expect another emotionally satisfying genre hybrid in the manner of Save the Green Planet are advised to adjust your expectations lower. I personally wish Director Im had gotten rid of all the CGI "horror" effects and simply focused on Dong-hyun's character, exploring, Scorsese- or Herzog-style, his grand, foolhardy obsession and the ultimate abyss it leads into. This might have given this slick but flawed film a chance to kindle the softly glowing ashes of greatness at its core.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

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