Rating: D+
Dir: Simon Zhao Ni
Star: Hu Xia, Ruoxi Chen, Zhu Tian Fu, Bu Yuan
The original Chinese title for this buries the lede, if Google is to be believed, translating into English as, “Extremely Cold Place”. Fair enough, it does take place in a chilly location. However, it doesn’t exactly do much to sell the movie. It’s a bit as if Jaws had been called Our Amity Vacation. On the other hand, I would have likely been less disappointed had I gone in based on the Chinese title. For this doesn’t contain as much octopus as I wanted. It’s barely even a squid game. The ropey effects are no help, but by the point they showed up, I was just glad to see something that had more than two legs.
It begins with a research base being attacked by a giant octopus. One of the few survivors is Han Lian (Hu), and a year later he’s back in the scientific saddle, working in the Antarctic for TCG Commercial Enterprise. He’s tasked, along with sidekick Qiangzi (Zhu), to take the boss’s daughter, Rosa (Chen), to the company’s research lab. Except, the facility’s director Liu Dao (Bu) lost his brother in the earlier incident, so there’s immediate enmity there. Of course, as is standard operating procedure for shady Chinese conglomerates in this genre, there is dubious scientific development being carried out, involving the splicing of octopus DNA. You should be able to figure out where this eventually ends up, without too much bother.
As hinted at above though, it takes way too long to reach that stuff. After the prologue you’ve got to wade through close to an hour, before anything acceptably tenticular shows up, and most of what fills in, is not very interesting. For example, on the journey to the lab, Rosa demands to serve penguins, and stomps her little foot until Han diverts to see them. Naturally, she ends up falling through the ice and has to be rescued. However, it’s all done in a low-energy way, and it’s obvious they are nowhere near the poles – well before the end credits, with their behind the scenes footage, confirm it. Similarly, the corporate shenanigans at the facility, feel more like an obligation than an essential part of the plot.
Things do improve once the Big O shows up, a nicely designed creature with an attractive colour palette, although it is hardly more convincing than the Antarctic setting. There is also a smaller version, which appears to be the Master to the larger one’s Blaster. It’s smart enough to free Rosa, whose voice sounds bizarrely like an anime character, from the fish-tank in which Liu has imprisoned her, and even work a computer (top). I imagined the animal checking its email, posting to social media, perhaps paying a bill or two. Sadly, such musings are about the greatest pleasure this has to offer, and it fails to pass muster or deliver anything close to what I hoped to see.
This review is part of our feature, When Chinese Animals Attack.