Iceman Reviews

An ambitious movie that both fails and succeeds, ICEMAN tells the story of a caveman brought back to life after having been cryogenically preserved eons before. Hutton is a scientist working with others on tundra somewhere near the North Pole when the group discovers a man who has been frozen in the ice for thousands of years. The body is brought back to the lab via helicopter, and a series of tense scenes commence as the Iceman (Lone) is thawed and then revived. The high-tech moments, as the scientists wait anxiously to see what the Iceman will do, are among the best and most suspenseful in the film. The group is shocked when the body begins to respond to stimuli and then revives. When the Iceman returns to the warm-blooded world, he is placed in a huge habitat replete with animals and insects and everything the scientists conjecture may have existed when he lived in a previous age. The Iceman and Hutton establish a student-mentor relationship as the scientist tries to teach the revived prehistoric man to communicate. (The other scientists are all for dissecting him to see what makes him tick and why he survived the rigors he did.) The movie is a good idea, but a good idea does not always result in a good movie. The picture was miscast. Hutton is just too young to be believable as a man of science. Although Lone plays the least credible character in the movie, he comes across as the most captivating and honest.