GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

sddavis63 If you can set aside the scientific implausibilities (or impossibilities) that abound in this movie, you can appreciate it from a number of angles. I first saw it many years ago and just watched it again - and still found it touching and relevant. Timothy Hutton starred as Sheppard - part of a scientific team in the Arctic who discover something frozen in the Arctic ice, and eventually discover that it's a Neanderthal who was somehow trapped there perhaps 40000 years ago. Intending to thaw him out and cut him up and ship various parts of his body around the world for study, the team is shocked when the Iceman comes to life. Played superbly by John Lone, the Iceman is alone, afraid and bewildered by the strange surroundings in which he finds himself, and the team basically continues to see him as a science project for lack of a better way to describe it - a specimen to be studied. But Sheppard sees him as a man and tries to understand him, communicate with him and befriend him. The interaction between the two came across as authentic, and the bond between them was believable. The viewer bonds with the Iceman too - or, if you don't, there's something wrong with you. The viewer starts to see him as a person; starts to sympathize with his plight. This is definitely a movie that pulls you in successfully.It's also a movie that - while dated in many ways - does have a strange relevance to today's world. We're not likely to ever find a frozen Neanderthal and bring him back to life. Even Otzi the Iceman (who was frozen in ice only 5000 years ago is most definitely dead and not coming back.) But there are scientists who think they can bring back extinct species like mammoths, and some speculation that eventually someone might try to bring back a Neanderthal (notwithstanding that most of us aside from Africans already have Neanderthal DNA in our bodies.) Watching this movie and thinking about that possibility - I started to wonder. Should we? Even if we could? What sort of life would we give to the poor creature? Would we treat it as a human, or would we treat it as a lab rat, subjecting it to never ending experiments and tests and studies? Would we be Sheppard - or would we be everybody else? I suspect I know the answer to that.Maybe it's best to leave the Neanderthals where they are - buried deep in our own DNA. (7/10)

dallasryan This is what I love about Movies back in the 80's and 90's, and really just older movies in general, you can see the difference. The difference is they didn't have the technology to make what they do today, which in actuality is usually too much! Therefore though, that's what people like, so that's what you get nowadays, tons of special effects with the same type of action, CGI, with little or no story. The older movies had better stories and were more clever about their action and special effects, and actually I preferred the not so fancy special effects, in my opinion, it kind of ruins a movie nowadays it seems because it's just too much CGI and too much action. So with Iceman, this is a very thought driven movie. Lot's of crazy ideas/concepts being thrown out there. I'm not sure how John Lone didn't get nominated for any kind of awards here(I mean he's even academy award nomination worthy here as his portrayal as the Neandrathal Man).It's truly a brilliant performance by Lone, and probably one of the best portrayals I've ever watched in a film of an actor playing a Neandrathal Man. Iceman is really worth a look just for John Lone's performance, it's a brilliant performance to watch. John Lone is an excellent actor, you won't even be able to believe that this is the same guy/actor from The Last Emperor.

bob-790-196018 What makes this picture very enjoyable indeed is the expert direction of Fred Schepisi and a really fascinating performance by John Lone as a Neanderthal man marooned in the 20th Century.If you believe the high-tech medical mumbo-jumbo in which which Lone is "revived," I have a bridge I can sell you, but in spite of this nonsense the sequence works wonderfully through skillful direction and editing. Very suspenseful and full of wonder. You completely forget to ask what a fully equipped trauma team, on the order of what you might find at Mass General Hospital's ER, is doing in the middle of the Arctic.Or, for that matter, what an isolated Arctic outpost is doing with an elaborate vivarium replicating a forest environment.Nevertheless, the encounters in that simulated environment between Timothy Hutton and Lindsay Crouse, on the one hand, and John Lone are fascinating and completely credible. I fully believe that if a Neanderthaler could be revived, he could be like this. The exploration of his language and concepts was intelligent and fun to watch.There is one more bravura sequence worth mentioning--when John Lone escapes from the vivarium and finds himself in the totally artificial 20th Century world of the Arctic station. Wonderfully acted and edited. It forces us to see our world from an alien viewpoint.Far less convincing is the anthropological speculation that serves as a rationale for the Neanderthaler's wandering off into the Arctic snows. We are told that he is going on his "dreamwalk," but all I could see was that he was headed for certain death by exposure and should be stopped.Early on in the movie, the medical team's immediate response to the revival of the Neanderthaler was preposterous--they wanted to cut him up and study him. Bad Scientists! Good Cave Man! No responsible scientists or medical people would have acted this way. Faced with a living Neanderthal man, the obvious response would be to take him to an environment where he could feel unthreatened and reasonably at home while modern people learned about him, his language, his culture, and, yes, his physiology. All in all, the movie is so well made that you overlook the silliness of the "science" until afterward, when you've had a chance to think about it.

Lucian Wischik A prehistoric man from 20 to 40 thousand years ago is found frozen in a block of arctic ice. A research team find him, manage to bring him back to life, and try to figure out how to interact with him.The performances feel genuine. The first dynamic is between the scientists who want to chop up his body and learn its biochemistry to better humankind vs those who want to study his habits and interact with him. The second dynamic is between the iceman and the ethnographer who gains his trust and friendship.All the time I was watching it, I was angry at the ham-fisted incompetence of the researchers. Sure, I know, this is a movie and so the scriptwriters put in bumbling incompetence to push the plot forward. But just imagine if it a prehistoric man really were brought to life. It would be such a marvellous opportunity for interaction and learning, and even a halfway competent research team would make something better of it.So, all the time, I was angry at the scriptwriters for cheating humanity and the iceman of this chance, and this didn't leave space to enjoy the film. 5/10.