Pity the residents of Las Vegas of the 70’s. Howard Hughes owned station KLAS and would apparently demand at any old time they broadcast 1968 thriller Ice Station Zebra. I just imagine people clicking the dial to the station just to see if it was on again and then changing it to a different station. I know seeing it once was enough for me.
All I knew going into this was it stars Rock Hudson as a sub commander who takes various military personnel and government agents to the arctic. I did not know he takes along for the ride Patrick McGoohan as a British secret agent who plays his cards very close to his chest, Ernest Borgnine as a jovial Russian agent and Jim Brown as a very strict Marine captain.
I also did not expect the first post-credit images to be in space. If this movie somehow had a sub in space, I would have been thrilled, even if I would have also been deeply confused. Then again, the ocean is a bit like space and submersibles are a little like spacecraft, aren’t they?
What we see in space is a satellite flying over the Earth and ejecting part of itself, a capsule which then opens a parachute and makes a soft landing near the titular weather station near the north pole. I won’t reveal what the importance of that capsule or its contents, though I will say it does make sense why Americans and Russians are both after it. I was a little less convinced the Brits would have an interest, but I can’t elaborate on that further without giving too many hints. One last thing I will say is all this rigamarole would be unnecessary today, having been long since supplanted by superior technologies.
Thinking about technology brings to mind some of the main flaws of this movie. Consider that opening sequence which starts in space and ends in the arctic. The satellite and the capsule ejected from it appear to be little more than cutout animation, and it could have been so much more effectively done using model work. The icy landscape where the capsule lands is a laughably artificial set.
A few effects fare better, and scenes of the sub navigating the underside of the unbroken sea ice is gorgeous miniature work which stands up to scrutiny even today. It is like it is floating through an ice cave with great stalactites posing a constant danger. I was very curious what Hudson would do should they happen to encounter a dead end, as I don’t know if subs can simply be put in reverse.
The threat faced by the sub’s crew is reinforced through the only piece of onboard equipment which made any sense to me, and that is the fathometer which measures the thickness of the ice. As their vessel progresses, a wavy line like a seismograph is produced, illustrating the peaks and valleys of the ice above them.
Very little else on the craft served any purpose I could discern, but people who love subs have probably seen this film a great many times, as much of the dialogue is lingo specific to the operations of such a vessel. I don’t care how accurate such minutia might be, as all I’m seeing are a bunch of guys on a set talking excitedly about things of which I have no knowledge. Such scenes weren’t drawing me in, so I felt no investment in their outcome. Odd how I could fully believe the landing on a new world in Alien and that was pure fiction. Here, we have pure fact that I never believed. This is the textbook definition of how more is truly less.
When I wasn’t bored by what transpires in the sub’s command center, I was irritated by the interaction between the leads. Borgnine is quite affable, but still highly suspicious, as he does things like taking walks around the area of the ship’s nuclear reactor. Hudson has a hatch in a floor opened so the Russian visitor can directly witness…something glowing which cause him to stare in wonder. We don’t see what it is, but I’m hoping he was looking at elves actually splitting giant atoms with chisels. Whatever it is, it glows intensely, so it also could be the mystery item in the suitcases in Pulp Fiction and Kiss Me Deadly.
The Russian may be suspect, but the others are just testosterone-fueled jerks. I’m not sure why Hudson chose to dislike McGoohan before the man is even aboard the sub, but he goes to some lengths to ensure they will ruffle each others feathers throughout the very long runtime. Borgnine and McGoohan have a past as parallels on opposite sides of the cold war, but both are suspicious of Brown as they have never met the stoic man before. Brown is so deliberately unlikeable that he tells Hudson: “I measure a man’s weakness by each man who likes him personally.”
About that runtime, this film is two and a half hours. One scene went on for so long that I fear there is a director’s cut out there somewhere in which every single person on board has to say, “She’s slowing…”, instead of just the dozen I believe do that in the theatrical version. In addition to scenes like that, the runtime is padded by entrance music, intermission, entr’acte and end music. That alone should convey the pretentiousness that is another fault of this production. I suspect the intermission, at least, might have been necessary for its original Cinerama presentation, though that is just my guess. I’m sure scenes like the endless footage of a real sub looked amazing on that giant, curved screen. And yet, I regard Cinerama in the same way I do 3-D, 4-D and every other gimmick that, if successful, makes a good film even better and, if it fails, still leaves you with a satisfying viewing experience.
I wasn’t satisfied, and I can’t imagine anybody else would when confronted with a major battle as the finale which takes place between Americans and Russians at the weather station, on that set which, again, looks unmistakably like something from Star Trek. I always thought Styrofoam was a human invention, yet all we apparently needed to do to get the stuff was to go on a polar expedition. And the snow is really soap flakes. Who knew?
With many subpar effects, it is jarring to consider 2001 was released the next year. It is the same unfortunate sea change in technologies which makes This Island Earth look laughable in comparison to Forbidden Planet and Logan’s Run to Star Wars. I try to take matters like this into consideration when evaluating a picture, that nobody can never know what will come after them, even in the span of a year. But nothing can excuse the miniatures of fighter jets which would have been awesome in the TV show Thunderbirds, but which are risible, especially when interspersed with footage of the real thing.
There were some amusing bits I did like in the film, or at least had me wondering about them. I speculated how the crew ever gets used to being at what appears to be a 30 degree angle as the sub descends quickly. The Marines taking roll call once the sub is underwater seemed odd to me, as if one of their number could have gone AWOL at some point after disembarking. Since I know McGoohan primarily from TV’s The Prisoner, I was amused by the use of a weather balloon here, and so I wondered if this was the inspiration to use for that show’s Rover. Watching one rise to shy here, I thought there was a missed opportunity to use the Fifth Dimension’s “Up, Up and Away”.
Ice Station Zebra is one subpar, subzero, sub-based entertainment. It is too long, too fake and filled almost exclusively with characters I either did not care for, of ones for which I felt no interest in whatever happened to them. As for Hughes’s fixation on the film, I don’t think even he was so far out of it that he genuinely enjoying the picture that much. I think he just kept demanding that station play it so much because he hated the people of Las Vegas.
Dir: John Sturges
Starring Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Patrick McGoohan, Jim Brown
Watched on Warner Bros. blu-ray