Black Crab

 Russia's invasion of Ukraine casts faint and slightly nauseating light on Andrew Berg's Black Crab, a 2022 Swedish war film, apparently made for Netflix.  The movie begins at a train station where refugees plead for passage on a spectacularly squalid-looking troop train.  (The soldiers are riding in cattle cars with dead troops wrapped up in plastic and stacked like cordwood against the side of the car.)  A modern-looking European city, shot in monochrome blue-green, seems to be perpetually on fire.  One shot shows an apartment block with a round hole shot right through it.  Lines of weary refugees trudge across the gloomy landscape while pillars of smoke rise on the horizon.  Traffic jams with cars full of refugees are shot up by masked gunmen.  Women and children are mowed down.  Of course, the movie was shot and edited before Putin launched his "special military exercise" in Ukraine, but much of the scene-setting seems weirdly prescient and is, in fact, more persuasive and frightening than the film's rather formulaic plot:  a squad of hard-bitten soldiers with special talents is sent on a highly consequential suicide mission.  (The movie involves six special forces  operatives entrusted with the mission -- it's the "dirty half-dozen.)  Black Crab  ("Svarte Krabbe" the Swedish name is fun to type) is fairly exciting, gruesome, and scary although it collapses in its unnecessary last 15 minutes.  

The film's premise is that some kind of war has wracked Sweden for several years.  The unnamed "enemy" is winning, about to overrun the last outpost of the Swedish army hunkered down at a place called Odo Island.  Six ultra-tough soldiers are ordered to skate 100 kilometers across the frozen archipelago to Odo Island to deliver a whatzit -- in this case, the cargo is two capsules of biological agent, some sort of virulent, world-destroying virus.  (I have no idea why the exotic mode of using ice-skaters on a frozen sea is employed for this mission -- why not use a helicopter or some other more efficient and swift mode of transport.)  The heroine, Edh (played by Noomi Rapace) is a tough-as-nails woman warrior; she's been told that her daughter, kidnapped several years previous by the enemy, has been found in a refugee camp and is waiting for her on the island -- this is supposed to motivate her to feats of heroism.  (And this also motivates the film to provide several uninformative and predictable flashbacks during the operation on the ice.)  The squad skates at night and, of course, there are all sorts of perils to navigate -- the ice is unpredictable and, sometimes, fractures drowning the soldiers in the frigid sea.  There are a number of fire fights and the squad is chased by helicopters that fire machine gun rounds into the fragile ice.  When the squad takes refuge on an island where a serene older couple is living, there is another shoot-out when the old man tries to machine-gun the soldiers.  One-by-one the six squad members are killed.  Predictably, the sortie across the ice ends with Edh chasing the other last survivor -- he means to destroy the noxious weapon of mass destruction.  But Edh, desperate to complete the mission, shoots him down and, then, struggling through a white void, encounters four men on horseback -- the horsemen of the apocalypse? -- before swooning on the ice.  (If horses can cross the frozen archipelago, why weren't they deployed to transport the viral gizmo?)  Edh wakes up in a subterranean fortress where the Swedish army's elite forces are hiding.  She now realizes that she's been deceived -- her daughter is nowhere in evidence.  This leads her (and the other survivor -- the guy she shot on the ice; apparently, she just winged him) to set out on a mission to destroy the viral weapon.  This final sequence seems to be from another movie and involves lavish underground sets, glowing laboratories full of masked technicians, and armies of bad guys who are a bit like the storm troopers in a Star Wars movie.  The ending doesn't work and is substantially different in tone and staging than the earlier, much more effective parts of the film.

The best part of the movie is the midnight skate across the frozen sea.  This sequence is gripping and a bit like a Western -- the frozen sea is pictorially similar to the desert and the lurking enemy are the Apaches that periodically attack the cavalry skating across the icy wasteland.  The movie looks nice, but it's all phony.  Obviously, none of the principal players know how to ice-skate.  So the film shows them in close-up with unconvincing rear-projection as they are supposedly skating to Odo.  Thus, the movie has to alternate from close-ups with mismatched rear projection to extremely long shots in which the identity of the skaters is concealed.  In a couple of scenes the heroes have to attack targets on small rocky islands -- somehow, they go from skating to running up steep snowy slopes without changing from their skates to combat boots.  (There are innumerable mistakes of this sort in the film.)  Some of the bivouacs on the ice involve sets that are obviously in a studio -- it's like John Ford showing lines of horsemen crossing Monument Valley only to cut to a scene around a campfire with obviously potted plants and a little heap of sand on the floor to simulate the desert and shot with unconvincing lighting to boot.  On a technical level, the picture looks good but it's clearly made cheaply.  The scenes with the refugees are shot with about a dozen extras and the apocalyptic imagery coming out of Poland and Lviv now puts this footage to shame.  But the picture is single-minded (until it goes off course) and the shots on the ice are atmospheric and, even, when the movie devolves into Ice Station Zebra sequences with fake snow and bad lighting, the movie remains intriguing -- all of the bad sets and worse lighting just reminds me of films made fifty years ago that were exciting to a teenage boy.