One would hope that a film about searching for northern lights in the far corners of Canada would look better and have better food for thought than this documentary by Peter Mettler; but then again, maybe it’s just that no medium can do justice to this most elusive and ethereal natural phenomenon. The film captures the magnetic light show in hazy time-lapsed film, which the filmmaker attained by exposing 1 frame every twenty seconds (so 1 second of motion takes 8 minutes to capture). The product is pretty much akin to every other video or film you’ve probably seen of an aurora borealis. Worse than the footage, though, is that Mettler frequently goes off on various psychological and meteorological tangents that cause the film to drag, and can grate on the nerves. He tells the viewer, in voiceover, facts that are neither profound or new, like the Inuits have close to 170 words for snow and ice, as if we are supposed to be in awe of the information all over again. The narrator (who I believe is Mettler but was left uncredited in the closing credits) sounds like Kevin Spacey’s Lester from American Beauty; not only his voice, but his tone, too, with a relaxed, borderline cynical acceptance of the beauty of our world’s hidden treasures and mysteries. I’d all but given up on the film by the time he recites this gem while presenting footage of a pile of snow: “the first thing ever filmed was a train pulling into a station; the audience ran in terror. Cold yet?”
While it is obvious that the northern lights are only visible near the pole, thus making the experience of looking at them in person pretty damn frigid, the film spends far too much of its time concentrating on the well-below 0 temperature. In addition to the aforementioned 170 words tidbit which included a recitation of many of the words and their definitions), we are also treated to a fun, but again extraneous, experiment of how to create a snow drift in your hotel room (drill a small hole in the door before a snow storm, wake up next to a mountain of snow). Not to mention many many shots of snow, most in the daytime. A years ago, I went to Iceland to try to get some video footage of some northern lights. Little did I know, though, that January, while the darkest month, is in the middle of one of the worse viewing seasons for the lights (they are much more visible near the equinoxes). I managed to get a grainy digital photo of a barely visible green blob that was very far away. I know this is a deviation from the review, but if Mettler is allowed to go off topic, then so am I.
The film does get much more interesting in its last third, finally (mostly) abandoning the lame voiceover and time-lapsed films of the sky, and explores the northern lights from perspectives that are not as familiar. Mettler shows some brilliant NASA footage of a space crew observing the northern lights from outer space, and the film’s final moments has us flying into an aurora, which caused some camera malfunctions, but it was intense nonetheless. The film, in these moments, actually follows through in showing the awe and grandeur of these lights, which had so far only been poetically pondered and blandly filmed. Better late than never, but this should have been a shorter, more focused film; one made by a man as curious as the viewer is, and less satisfied with banal facts and pseudo-intellectual musings.