Against the Ice (2022)
Directed by Peter Flinth
No — Against the Ice is not woke, scoring 0 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Against the Ice arrives with the quiet confidence of a film that has no interest in being about anything other than ice.
Consciousness Markers
The cast is almost entirely white European men, with a single minor female character; there is no deliberate diverse or inclusive casting.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in this survival narrative.
The lone woman, Naja Holm, functions as a love interest and a hallucinated comfort figure; no feminist themes are present.
The geopolitical conflict is between Denmark and the United States over Arctic claims, not a racial or social-justice narrative.
The ice and extreme weather are a survival obstacle, not an environmentalist message about climate change.
There is no economic critique or eat-the-rich sentiment; the film is a man-versus-nature endurance story.
No body-positivity themes; the physical toll is depicted as grim survival hardship, not a body-acceptance message.
The characters' encroaching madness and hallucinations are portrayed as psychological breakdown from isolation, not neurodivergent identity.
The film faithfully adapts a documented true expedition; it does not reinterpret history through a modern ideological lens.
The film is a quiet, tension-driven survival drama with no preachy messaging or moralizing monologues.
Why it received this score
Against the Ice arrives with the quiet confidence of a film that has no interest in being about anything other than ice. Two Danish explorers, Ejnar Mikkelsen and Iver Iversen, spend three years in Greenland proving that the Peary Channel does not exist, and the film tracks their frostbite, their dwindling dog supply, and their slowly loosening grip on reality with a patience that borders on the geological. It is a man-versus-nature endurance story, and it is content to remain one.
The casting is uniformly pale and Nordic, which suits a 1909 Danish expedition and offers no corrective gestures. Heida Reed appears as Naja Holm, Mikkelsen's fiancee, largely as a memory and later as a hallucination, which spares us any reckoning with her interior life. The central conflict is geopolitical: Denmark against the United States over Arctic claims, settled by a cairn full of paper. No economic critique intrudes, no environmental sermon, no meditation on bodies or minds that departs from the nineteenth-century vocabulary of madness. The ice is simply cold.
The film does offer a strange, melancholy stillness. The two men fight a polar bear, nearly shoot each other, and imagine their dead relatives, and the camera watches without commentary. There is no monologue explaining what we should feel. That restraint is rare enough in 2022 that it registers almost as an oversight, and the critical reception was accordingly lukewarm. A viewer hoping for moral instruction will leave empty-handed. A viewer hoping for a man to be cold for two hours will be well served.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
In 1909, two explorers fight to survive after they're left behind while on a Danish expedition in ice-covered Greenland.
Questions about Against the Ice
Is Against the Ice woke?
No — Against the Ice is not woke, scoring 0 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does Against the Ice have any woke elements?
No. All 10 markers score zero.
How does Against the Ice compare to other 2022 movies?
It ranks #211 of the 223 films from 2022 we've scored; their average is 22. The wokest is Bros (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.