Whiteout (2009)

Whiteout arrives from 2009, a year when a murder mystery set at the bottom of the world could still be sold on the novelty of its location alone. Kate Beckinsale plays Carrie Stetko, the lone Deputy U.S. Marshal stationed at the Amundsen-Scott base, a woman with frostbitten fingers and a Miami backstory she would prefer to leave buried. A body turns up on the open ice. There is an ice axe, a Soviet cargo plane, and a box of diamonds that several people would kill for. The film moves through these pieces with the enthusiasm of a clerk stamping forms.

On the matter of social consciousness, the picture is largely inert. Beckinsale's marshal is competent and central, which counts for something, though the screenplay never bothers to argue a case about women in law enforcement. Columbus Short appears as Delfy, a pilot who helps with the investigation. His presence is unremarked, and his character is defined by utility, not identity. The production history proves more revealing than the film itself: an earlier draft gave the story two female leads, and a studio, worried about the size of that audience, inserted a man opposite the marshal. That is a footnote about 2002, not a theme in 2009.

Everything else registers at zero. The Antarctic cold is atmosphere, not an environmental warning. The diamond smuggling is ordinary greed, not a critique of capital. Race, sexuality, body image, and neurological difference go unmentioned, and the film never pauses to instruct us on how to feel about any of them. It is a thriller that wants only to be a thriller, and on that modest errand it still manages to be dull. The villain's motive is money. The lesson is nothing.

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