July 23, 2005
This is not your run of the mill boy meets girl from other side of the tracks, they live happily ever after (or not). This is an extraordinarily deep and pleasing look at what happens when technology fails, and man's only salvation is another person who is still in touch with nature.
I was moved by this movie, and found it to be nuanced and elegant. Not only does the pilot survive, but in doing so, he returns to the land, he returns to “the people of the land” (the Eskimos), and he overcomes the falsely-rooted prejudices of those who fall prey to the fools' gold that is found in technology, and scorn those who remain close to the land.
At all levels, this is an extraordinary movie.
Books that support this theme include Lionel Tiger's “The Manufacture of Evil,” Jean Ralston Saul, “The Dictatorship of Reason in the West,” Clifford Stoll, “Silocon Valley Snake Oil,” and Norman Cousins, “The Pathology of Power.”
