March 2nd, 2006

   Animal lovers, to the alert! Forget about the penguins. A whole new gang of four-legged love makers have arrived to establish squatter’s rights on your hearts. EIGHT BELOW, a surprise hit inspired by a true story with the kind of charm, action, adventure, and humanity for which I was totally unprepared, is about eight of the most beautiful sled dogs of all time, stranded for more than four months at the bottom of the earth in the icy wastes of an Antarctic winter and the incredible things they do to survive while waiting for the people they trust to find and rescue them. This is a movie you will cheer and cherish.
Set in 1993, the last year dog sleds were allowed to work on scientific expeditions in the punishing winds and blizzards of the South Pole (to save the seals from distemper, believe it or not), the story focuses on eight gorgeous canine characters capable of love, loyalty, humor, friendship, and heroism above and beyond the call of duty. The dogs have names and personalities, and before this movie ends, you will know them all personally.
The people on a mission at the National Science Foundation Research Base aren’t bad either. Paul Walker gets his first mature role as Jerry Shepard, the skilled and independent-thinking guide who trained the dog team to be members of his own family. Jason Biggs is Cooper, the map maker and comic relief. Moon Bloodgood is Katie, the pretty bush pilot who risks her own life daily to fly the crew to safety. Bruce Greenwood is the scientist with a grant to search for million-year-old meteorites.
Forging across glaciers so deep that one slip could plunge you to the bottom of the earth while the scientist locates the first meteorite from the planet Mercury, Jerry receives orders that the first storm of winter is approaching and he must return to home base. But the scientist he’s escorting doesn’t want to turn back without a piece of that rock. An accident plunges Jerry’s charge into an ice floe that results in frostbite, hypothermia, and paralysis, and only the dogs know how to save them. The delay plunges everyone into a storm so intense that all planes are cancelled and there’s no room for the eight dogs in Katie’s helicopter. Jerry never recovers from the guilt, blame, and personal responsibility of leaving his best friends behind. Part of the movie is about Jerry’s efforts to rescue the dogs who saved his life, but the really awesome part is about what the marooned dogs do to feed, protect, and save each other to stay alive. Their adventures are exhilarating, gripping, and positively inspiring.
The dogs never cease to amaze and delight. They mourn and grieve, just like people. They display the most staggering examples of loyalty and mutual respect. You think your dog is a four-legged Einstein, but these huskies are patient, resourceful, and capable of human feelings beyond the telling. (One is a comic, another plays a mean game of poker with the grownups.) They have names like Max and Maya and Dewey and Truman, and each one has a face and personality distinctly different from the others. (A book could be written about the bow-wow casting and training of the eight stars, and some day I hope director Frank Marshall publishes one.)
From Washington to New Zealand, Jerry devotes his life to reaching those dogs. The adventurer, who has achieved an exalted place in the annals of science for the meteor he brought back to Pasadena, feels responsible too. After all, he wouldn’t be alive if it were not for those dogs. Somehow, after months of sacrifice and dedication, four crew members—Jerry, the research scientist, the lady pilot, and the cartographer—pool their money and brains, travel by boat, helicopter, and snowmobile, and reach the deserted base in Antarctica to find…ah, but you have to see this movie to believe your eyes. At the screening I attended, grown men were blubbering.
Not since Lassie Come Home has there been a film about the limitless bonds between men and dogs that triumph over adversity. Unlike a low-budget documentary like the great March of the Penguins, no expensive Disney production unit could afford an entire location shoot in the sub-zero temperatures and howling, razor-sharp 200 m.p.h. winds of Antarctica, but the wilds of British Columbia, Greenland, and Norway are majestic stand-ins. In fact, every challenge in a film of this much daunting magnitude is met with unforgettable filmmaking expertise. The result is a movie that will pump your adrenaline, make you laugh and cry, and nourish your soul. I want one of the dogs in Eight Below, and I want him now.
I guess everyone has to start somewhere, but a Bernard Malamud novel-into-film starring Snoop Dog? To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, “What new hell is this?” The 2006 kind, I’m afraid, which pretty much demonstrates how low movies have sunk in these desperate times. But let’s forget about The Tenants, a grim look at two bums fighting for space in a graffiti-splattered slum dwelling in Brooklyn waiting for the wrecker’s ball—one of a glut of new movies with budgets that look like they could never have exceeded $99.95.
Let’s move on uptown to Harrison Ford in FIREWALL, the kind of breathlessly paced, temple-pounding action-adventure Clark Gable or Robert Mitchum might happily have tackled in the great days when they turned out movies that were still fun and coherent. Firewall is not great and it’s not always coherent either. But I had a swell time. In my book, star power, slick production values, and a fat budget that can make an explosion look like more than a stunt still count. You get plenty of all three in Firewall.
No more sarcasm about how the big stars are aging badly. I no longer care if Robert Redford has a face like the map of Utah or if Elizabeth Taylor looks like she just swallowed her dining room table. Bring me some icons, please. Harrison Ford is aging, too, but so what? It’s happening to us all. And even if he seems a bit long in the tooth for the punishing physical agony he endures, I’ll bet he could pass a stress test with flying colors. In Firewall, he Indian wrestles a script that pits him against state-of-the-art criminal technology, and it’s a thrill to see a real human win.
He plays Jack Stanfield, a computer security specialist who investigates risk and fraud loss in a big Seattle bank where he has built a respected career designing the most effective anti-theft computer systems in the industry. His specialty is firewalls. One day a debt collector walks in and accuses him of gambling away $95,000 of his company’s money online. Huh? Jack is a button-down family man with a successful architect wife (Virginia Madsen), a 14-year-old daughter, and an 8-year-old son. He’s not a gambler; he’s never even heard of this company. You think it’s going to be a pulse-beater about identity theft (an idea whose time has come in a vulnerable age when just turning on your computer puts you in harm’s way).
But the alleged “debt collector” (Paul Bettany) is really a cold-blooded preppie killer who leads a gang of brilliant computer hackers planning one of the biggest robberies in history. He confronts Jack in the parking lot at gunpoint and forces him to drive home, where his gang has already invaded the premises, changed the password on the alarm system, cloned the cell phone, and taken the family hostage. The “gambling fraud” was just a scam to get inside the bank. The real purpose of all these terror tactics is to force Jack to design the software that will relieve the bank and all of its branches of 100 million dollars of its richest investors’ assets. Jack and his wife are both resourceful and clever, but every attempt to get out of the dilemma or notify authorities is thwarted by the genius mercenaries, every escape route blocked, every friend and ally eliminated.
While Jack is at the bank, monitored by hidden cameras, the problems on the domestic front thicken. Wouldn’t you know the daughter is a sex kitten who narrowly avoids gang lust and the son is both asthmatic and allergic to peanuts—knowledge of which the gang cunningly takes advantage in order to bend Jack to their will. Mayhem ensues. To tense things up even more, the entire film takes place during one of Seattle’s worst storms.
The suspense centers on Jack’s ability to transfer a fortune into the gang’s foreign accounts without the bank finding out, and save his family’s life in the process. How he does it, you’d have to be the inventor of Microsoft to figure out. By the time Jack gets hopping mad—and I mean Harrison Ford/jawbone-setting/eyes-narrowing-to-slits mad—the movie gets hopping loopy. When Jack scales a building like Spider-Man and turns the tables on the hacker felons, the movie no longer makes much sense. Finally, when the only way he can locate his family’s secret whereabouts is through the collar on the family dog that looks like Daisy in the Blondie and Dagwood movies, I just gave up, sat back, and decided to enjoy the ride.
Some of the snafus and red herrings border on comedy, but the movie never relaxes its grips on the nerves. For someone who misses his old electric Smith-Corona typewriter, I don’t even pretend to understand what all the techno-babble is about. But I was not bored, and that, in what passes for cinema today, is really saying something. The production values are first-rate, the script by Joe Forte seizes and holds attention, the direction by Richard Loncraine does more than move people from one place to the next like chess pieces. It really expands a vital sense of people in peril.
And the acting has the spit and polish of military boots. Harrison Ford has been doing the furrowed brow bit for such a long time it’s hard to know if he can act or not, but his charisma is undeniable. Paul Bettany (as the smooth-shaved, elegant-speaking upscale crook) makes for one of the coolest, most ruthless villains since Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train. And Virginia Madsen is moment-to-moment believable as the wife and mother who will do whatever it takes to fight for her family’s survival.
Ultimately, Firewall is another technology thriller about the familiar evils, dangers, and ultimate devastation that modern technology can cause—the kind of movie I never understand. It should be reviewed by Bill Gates. But unlike so many others, it kept me alert, terrified, and royally entertained.