Nova Zembla - Unbekanntes Land

The movie starts interesting and one might be hoping for an interesting adventure. But unfortunately it totally breaks down. Nothing is happening anymore, it gets only extremely boring and predictable. All the characters are so blunt and uninteresting. You do not care at all for the characters and approximately in the middle you just start to skip further and further and still, you do not miss anything. I do not want to spoil something here, but the ending is totally predictable and cliche. No character development at all, it is really sad to produce something like that. It should have been totally foreseeable, just by reading the script to understand, that this can only go south (although they are going north actually).

The very clever thing about this picture is that Reinout Oerlemans got so much money for making it, and so much praise for having made it, when - as seen by the result - he had no idea what he was doing. If he actually did direct the performance of the actors, he steered them in the wrong direction. From the looks of it, he just let them do whatever they could think of. Many a time not the best way to go. Reinout seemingly never watched a technically good production, as aired daily on televisions around the world, because technically this film is a dud. Lighting is very much below par. Dutch films of the seventies got away with it, maybe even eighties. But nowadays this is a big no no. As far as editing it concerned: I don't know what stake Reinout had in that part of the post production process, but it is worse than any amateur could have done. Maybe I am too close to this subject, being an editor myself. But someone with some sense should have stopped this senseless shredding of scenes. So: no directing of actors, no directing of cutting, and no directing of lighting are the obvious drawbacks that immediately catch your eyes. In fact, this picture scores so badly on these points, that I too could not keep watching. Too bad, because the story itself has all the hallmarks of a great picture.

Nova Zembla doesn't hold up to the promises made. In fact, it fails utterly, which, truly, is a shame. An adventurous story, a beautiful setting and (for Dutch standards) good acting but all that cannot make watching this film bearable.

The storytelling is unbelievably slow. While being promised an action-packed heroic story it instead halts drastically every time a little climax should be due, resulting in the opposite. And if your film is to be made for a Dutch audience based on a classic Dutch history lesson almost every Dutch person will remember, you just can't get away with it. Not even with showing random scenes of Doutzen Kroes' breasts.

The cast was fine though and the acting wasn't particularly bad. The lines didn't seem forced and it all had a genuine feel, which is often lacking in Dutch films. The technical side of this film wasn't bad either and the effects, costumes, locations and props are a rare perfect blend.

It is clear this film lacked the experience of a great captain and should be a learning opportunity for inexperienced director Reinout Oerlemans. Nova Zembla fails to hoist the colours and sail full speed ahead and instead feels more like a rowing boat without oars. A typical trailer-beats-film.

The Age of Exploration (or age of Discovery). Those 200 years (more or less) from 1450 to 1650, when a few brave men coming from Western Europe, traveling in fragile wooden ships and armed with primitive fire weapons, basically conquered the world. It's strange that very few movies have been made out of that era. Perhaps this is so because this era is now a bit politically incorrect (since it many times involved Europeans invading and conquering Native people). But movies dealing with early polar exploration should not have such a problem, since there were few if any native people there. So here comes this fine film from the Netherlands that tells the true story of Willem Barents, the Dutch navigator that seeking a Northern route to China (Spain, being in war with the Netherlands at the time make it difficult for Dutch ships to go to the east through the Cape of Good Hope) reached in 1596 (more than three centuries before the North Pole was reached) the island of Nova Zembla in the High Arctic Sea, an island that is now a part of Russia. However, the ice soon broke the ship and the crew has to spend in the island a harrowing winter. Shot in 3D mostly in Iceland, this film is handsomely made, with a good, classic storytelling. The story is mostly told through the eyes of Gerrit de Veer, the young, inexperienced chronicler in the expedition. Famous Dutch model Doutzen Kroes has a small role, appearing mostly in flashbacks, as Gerrit's fiancé back in Holland (she was obviously hired because she was believed to be a box office draw, not because her character was really needed in the story).

While I think the 3D-effect in today's cinema should enhance the human experience to get a certain feeling of stepping right into the scene, the three dimensional engineers of the Nova Zembla crew are taking the effect way too far. The extreme shallow dept-of-field (DOF) of most of the scenes creates an very unnatural effect. Not like the human eye it would see. 3D in Nova Zembla brings unnecessary unsharpness to wide shots instead of crisp details. It reminds me more of early cartoons and anime/manga than state-of-the-art improvement of the modern cinema experience. A missed chance for Reinout...

On the other hand, the shots from above (like the viewing angle used in the shots where we can see the boat from above) are well filmed. And the 3D-effect while filming from a lower angle through the grass does a great job. But those are just minutes of the whole movie play time.