Netflix’s action movie Black Crab turns ice skating into a crucial post-apocalyptic skill

Netflix’s action movie Black Crab turns ice skating into a crucial post-apocalyptic skill

Action movie press material imported from Netflix Sweden black crab let’s say it’s set in a post-apocalyptic world, and that communicates the look of this eerily stylish military thriller. But “post-apocalyptic” is still a bit of a misnomer. It’s truly mid-apocalyptic, and the on-screen apocalypse isn’t a plague, an alien invasion, or an environmental disaster. It’s a war – a conventional, brutal war that has been going on for years.
The geopolitics of this situation is intentionally kept obscure. In an opening flashback, a car radio mentions rioting, “both sides” blaming each other, and the start of a civil war. The setting appears to be Sweden. The enemy is only ever called “the enemy”. As far as viewers can tell, it feels more like a society turned against itself than a clash of cultures or nations, but no ideological split is ever explained. What started the conflict must have been serious, because society is about to be completely destroyed.
All this lack of detail is presumably intended to underscore how meaningless the conflict is or to keep the audience from getting bogged down in their personal political views on the war. But really, it feels like a failure of the imagination that makes the movie itself meaningless: a dark dissertation on how hell war is, but also looks pretty cool.

Photo: Johan Bergmark/Netflix
Noomi Rapace, as tough and collected as she was in the original Girl with dragon tattoo, embodies Caroline Edh, a soldier recruited for a secret mission, the “Black Crab operation” of the title. It’s a bitter winter, and his side is losing the war. They are almost completely cut off, and their only hope of turning the tide is to bring two mysterious canisters to a research station on a remote island. And the only way is to travel quietly at night, sneaking behind enemy lines, through an archipelago locked in pack ice. The ice isn’t thick enough to support a vehicle, so Caroline and a ragtag crew of five other soldiers are brought together because they all have an old-school Nordic skill: they know how to skate.
It’s easy to see why the premise of Jerker Virdborg’s 2002 novel appealed to commercials director Adam Berg, who makes his debut here. The visual appeal and inherent tension are clear, and to be fair, Berg achieves both with panache. The small team glides silently through an eerie and fragile white wilderness, a desolate world suspended delicately above a deadly void of freezing seawater. The night sky is lit up with luminous arcs, muzzle flashes, distant explosions and the otherworldly glow of the Northern Lights. Sometimes the images have a surreal poetry. The team must face the cold, the treacherous ice, the ever-present enemy – and the other, because they are strangers and they don’t know who to trust.
Here, in the strange and menacing moment it evokes, black crab works quite well. Bursts of economic action are charted with clarity and bitten with brutal precision. The quest is simple and the threats are tangible. When Berg and his co-writer Pelle Rådström are looking for something more, however, they simply close their hands in the air. Empty clichés abound.

Photo: Jonas Alarik/Netflix
Rapace is convincing, but can’t do much with the thin material. Caroline, rebellious and unstable, is seen in flashback scenes trying to survive the early days of the war with her daughter Vanja, who is torn from her. His superiors exploit this pain as motivation, and their promise of an easy end to the war if his mission succeeds is suspect to say the least. But she charges anyway. His nihilistic drive makes sense, but his mindless obliviousness doesn’t, and when the scales fall from his eyes, viewers are likely to roll theirs. The antagonism between her and another of the soldiers, Nylund (Jakob Oftebro), fizzles and flares and fizzles, but the plot demands it. The pathetic slurs with the other soldiers are undermined by the way they are fundamentally drawn and made.
There is another trickier problem with black crab. When this film was made, a horrible full-scale turf war in a modern European country was a dark fantasy. Now that is not the case. Berg shows us scenes of bombed-out buildings and miserable refugee camps that resemble the news that arrives each night from reports of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s not the filmmakers’ fault, and the world of black crab is barely far enough from reality to pass for palatable entertainment.
But the comparison also exposes the film for the empty gesture that it is. Yes, war is hell, and it inspires people to imagine doing the unimaginable. But it also happens for real and complicated reasons, and it has real stakes: humanitarian, political, moral. By stripping their world of all that meaning, Berg and his collaborators show us only a beautiful and horrible emptiness. Frankly, it’s crap.
black crab is now streaming on Netflix.

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#Netflixs #action #movie #Black #Crab #turns #ice #skating #crucial #postapocalyptic #skill

Netflix’s action movie Black Crab turns ice skating into a crucial post-apocalyptic skill

Action movie press material imported from Netflix Sweden black crab let’s say it’s set in a post-apocalyptic world, and that communicates the look of this eerily stylish military thriller. But “post-apocalyptic” is still a bit of a misnomer. It’s truly mid-apocalyptic, and the on-screen apocalypse isn’t a plague, an alien invasion, or an environmental disaster. It’s a war – a conventional, brutal war that has been going on for years.
The geopolitics of this situation is intentionally kept obscure. In an opening flashback, a car radio mentions rioting, “both sides” blaming each other, and the start of a civil war. The setting appears to be Sweden. The enemy is only ever called “the enemy”. As far as viewers can tell, it feels more like a society turned against itself than a clash of cultures or nations, but no ideological split is ever explained. What started the conflict must have been serious, because society is about to be completely destroyed.
All this lack of detail is presumably intended to underscore how meaningless the conflict is or to keep the audience from getting bogged down in their personal political views on the war. But really, it feels like a failure of the imagination that makes the movie itself meaningless: a dark dissertation on how hell war is, but also looks pretty cool.

Photo: Johan Bergmark/Netflix
Noomi Rapace, as tough and collected as she was in the original Girl with dragon tattoo, embodies Caroline Edh, a soldier recruited for a secret mission, the “Black Crab operation” of the title. It’s a bitter winter, and his side is losing the war. They are almost completely cut off, and their only hope of turning the tide is to bring two mysterious canisters to a research station on a remote island. And the only way is to travel quietly at night, sneaking behind enemy lines, through an archipelago locked in pack ice. The ice isn’t thick enough to support a vehicle, so Caroline and a ragtag crew of five other soldiers are brought together because they all have an old-school Nordic skill: they know how to skate.
It’s easy to see why the premise of Jerker Virdborg’s 2002 novel appealed to commercials director Adam Berg, who makes his debut here. The visual appeal and inherent tension are clear, and to be fair, Berg achieves both with panache. The small team glides silently through an eerie and fragile white wilderness, a desolate world suspended delicately above a deadly void of freezing seawater. The night sky is lit up with luminous arcs, muzzle flashes, distant explosions and the otherworldly glow of the Northern Lights. Sometimes the images have a surreal poetry. The team must face the cold, the treacherous ice, the ever-present enemy – and the other, because they are strangers and they don’t know who to trust.
Here, in the strange and menacing moment it evokes, black crab works quite well. Bursts of economic action are charted with clarity and bitten with brutal precision. The quest is simple and the threats are tangible. When Berg and his co-writer Pelle Rådström are looking for something more, however, they simply close their hands in the air. Empty clichés abound.

Photo: Jonas Alarik/Netflix
Rapace is convincing, but can’t do much with the thin material. Caroline, rebellious and unstable, is seen in flashback scenes trying to survive the early days of the war with her daughter Vanja, who is torn from her. His superiors exploit this pain as motivation, and their promise of an easy end to the war if his mission succeeds is suspect to say the least. But she charges anyway. His nihilistic drive makes sense, but his mindless obliviousness doesn’t, and when the scales fall from his eyes, viewers are likely to roll theirs. The antagonism between her and another of the soldiers, Nylund (Jakob Oftebro), fizzles and flares and fizzles, but the plot demands it. The pathetic slurs with the other soldiers are undermined by the way they are fundamentally drawn and made.
There is another trickier problem with black crab. When this film was made, a horrible full-scale turf war in a modern European country was a dark fantasy. Now that is not the case. Berg shows us scenes of bombed-out buildings and miserable refugee camps that resemble the news that arrives each night from reports of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s not the filmmakers’ fault, and the world of black crab is barely far enough from reality to pass for palatable entertainment.
But the comparison also exposes the film for the empty gesture that it is. Yes, war is hell, and it inspires people to imagine doing the unimaginable. But it also happens for real and complicated reasons, and it has real stakes: humanitarian, political, moral. By stripping their world of all that meaning, Berg and his collaborators show us only a beautiful and horrible emptiness. Frankly, it’s crap.
black crab is now streaming on Netflix.

Register to receive the newsletter
Patch NotesA weekly roundup of Polygon’s best stuff

One more thing!
Please check your email to find a confirmation email and follow the steps to confirm your humanity.

E-mail (mandatory)

By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Notice and European Users agree to the Data Transfer Policy.
Subscribe

#Netflixs #action #movie #Black #Crab #turns #ice #skating #crucial #postapocalyptic #skill