Nan ji jue lian [Till the End of the World] (2018)

(On TV, August 2020) Sometimes, a film has to choose between romance and adventure. Till the end of the world ends up picking romance, and that does not mean a happy ending. The premise of the film couldn’t be more evocative, as a shallow businessman and a serious scientist crash-land in Antarctica with scarcely any hope of being rescued. Making their way to an abandoned cabin, they set out to engineer their own return to civilization… but will they manage it in time? Impressively enough, the film resists the indulgence of flashbacks showing how we got there. A good portion of the film was shot in Antarctica itself, and the plot keeps focus on the characters as they learn to trust each other and fall in love along the way. When the third act comes rolling in, we’ve already seen all of what the southernmost continent has to offer in terms of dangers and wonders. All that’s left is the final rescue, but as I said – the film has to pick between adventure and romance, and goes for full-bore romantic tragedy. I felt that it was the wrong choice after so much hardship– but then again, it’s not my movie. Shot with impressive technical credentials (even though the special effects are, typically for Chinese movies, not always polished), it’s an adventure film not too dissimilar to The Mountain Between Us, if it wasn’t for a somewhat more tragic approach. I liked the film on a purely visual level (and had no choice at times, since the subtitles were often too small and impossible to read against a white backdrop at standard TV resolution) even despite the catalogue approach to the Antarctic features and some very unlikely scenes. (That whale skeleton on the beach? A bit too tidy.) There’s an admirable purity is keeping the focus on the two characters and the Antarctic continent itself… almost enough to forgive a disappointing conclusion.