Polaris

“Languages spoken are fictional and meant to be interpreted by the viewer without subtitles.” — Text at the start of the film.

Long ago, there was the Fires, then the Floods, and then came the Freezing. Now, many years later, in a frozen future world of ice and desolation, Sumi is a magical and (briefly) one-eyed child who was raised in isolation by a polar bear. One day, she and Mama Bear leave their home in the great cold of the far north, and follow the beckoning call of a brightly shining star to their destiny.

Sumi is a lot like the feral kid from Roadwarrior, she mostly growls and sniffs and makes “curious bear” faces, but she also has magic powers connected to that pulsing star. She seems to be able to speak bear, and pine tree, and dog too. She can basically talk to Nature. She can also take a dead person’s eyeball, stick it in her own head and make it her own, which is… impressive. Also, the story is narrated by a woman who is dead at the start of film, until Sumi steals her corpse and revives her, using the healing power of her star magic.

So, yeah… she’s a magical star child.

It’s unclear if only women survived this apocalypse, but Sumi at least only encounters other women in this film. Most of them are brutal and violent barbarians, while others are just trying to survive, which is not an easy task in this cold and cruel world. This is something Sumi discovers for herself when she wanders away from Mama Bear and ends up getting separated from her. Following the creaking and groaning screams of the trees, Sumi stumbles across other humans—the first humans she’s ever seen—chopping down the forest.

This is not good, obviously, because hell is reliably always other people.

These women are warriors, clad in fur, rusty spiked metal, and animal horns, while riding noisy snowmobiles and carrying crude axes. They live in an old world junkyard, a maze of wreckage buried under piles of snow. They also drink some kind of goopy antifreeze-looking tree sap booze too. Regardless of all that, one thing is very clear… They are the enemies of the polar bear, so they are Sumi’s enemies too. This is bad news for Sumi, as the savages capture her, and throw her in a cage.

When Sumi manages to escape, they chase her relentlessly.

Sumi does make some friends along the way, like a strange old hermit woman who teaches her the secret of fire, and also how to jam on a harmonica. There’s the corpse of the narrator too, the woman Sumi revives. With the help of these friends, Sumi fights her way across the icy tundra, through the snowy forests, and amongst the wreckage of the old world, as she tries to reunite with Mama Bear.

I love this whole set-up.

Post-apocalyptic warriors of the Wasteland? Yes, please. Magic star child raised by a polar bear? That’s the kind of fantasy world nonsense I can get behind. Now, some of you might ask… How exactly did this magic child raised by a polar bear get clothes in the first place? Did the polar bear sew them? That’s very clever of you to notice, how about you drink a tall glass of shut the fuck up and just watch the movie?

In the end, Polaris is a story of magic and wonder, and the birth of myths and legends. It is a new tale explaining Ursa Major and Ursa Minor for a new world.

Kind of. It mostly works.

Polaris is classic post-apocalyptic warrior of the wasteland film, like Waterworld or Mad Max, but instead of endless oceans or endless desert, it’s set in the endless winter wastes. Polaris’ main trick is that none of the characters—except the narrator—speak any familiar languages at all, and when it comes to the languages they do speak, there are no subtitles.

Tolkien famously made elvish a “real” language, and Star Trek did the same with Klingon, and ever since then every nerd property on the planet, instead of concerning themselves with their subpar scripts, their shitty world-building, or their problematic cultural appropriations, have instead focused on hiring a linguist to create a “real” language out of the gibberish their characters speak. This is a huge waste of time. It’s dumb, and brings absolutely nothing to the table narrative-wise. Like, who the fuck cares that they’re “actually” speaking Dothraki. Fuck you.

So, I appreciate how—much like in the beloved Rae Dawn Chong (Commando) and Ron Perlman (Transformers: Rise of the Beasts) caveman epic The Quest For Fire—the language the characters speak in Polaris is just nonsense sounds, and the intent is made clear through both the actors’ performances and context clues. I liked that. It’s a little bit limiting when it comes to the more in-depth concepts, and occasionally you are reminded that the actors are just making nonsense noises at each other in very emphatic ways, but mostly it’s fun.

I also appreciated how much good old fashioned post-apocalyptic wasteland violence there is in this film. Lots of bright red blood in snow, y’know? Good stuff.

But… Polaris is a very ambitious film, and after awhile, that ambition kind of outweighs anything that the plot has to offer. It ends up feeling a little long, and maybe a little too repetitive, as Sumi goes from one deadly encounter in the snow to the next. Part of this is due to the fact the fights are both not that well choreographed and for the most part, are not that exciting, but it’s mostly due to the gimmick of not having any real language in the film, something I think the filmmakers were aware of too, as what little dialogue there is, it’s obviously been put there to bridge the gap in storytelling that was left by the lack.

Additionally, the “no language” thing also has a big Nerd Problem that is a little hard for me to overlook…

Okay, so… from 2014 to 2020, there was a show on the CW called The 100. If not for the show Supernatural, which ran on the CW for 15 seasons, the 100 could fairly be called the most CW-y show to ever CW in the history in the CW channel. If you don’t know what that means, it’s kind of hard to explain, but a “CW show” is a show that aired on the CW, obviously, featuring a gaggle of pretty little Disney kids, all of them running around the beautiful forests of British Columbia, being melodramatic about some sci-if/fantasy nonsense, and then either making out with each other, or karate fighting, all while the most vapid pop hits of the time play.

Here’s the picture of the cast…

Look at ‘em… standing there, all looking in slightly different directions, like a gang of JC Penny’s catalog models gone bad who are kind of lost, like it’s their first time in the big city, and they’re trying to find their way to the subway so they can get to the Imagine Dragons concert on time.

So, the story of The 100 was that a nuclear war had destroyed the planet, and the only people who survived were the inhabitants of the dozen or so national space stations in orbit at the time. The various space stations then lash themselves together, and try to live in harmony above an irradiated Earth. 100 years later, the squares in charge of the station have had just about enough of 100 of the local teenagers. These teens are too cool for school, and they love to break the rules, smoking, loitering in the halls, being sarcastic, talking back, wearing their collars popped up. The adults can’t have this kind of disruption, so they load the 100 kids in a capsule and shoot it down to Earth, like… fuck you, kids, here’s a one-way ticket to hell. Let us know if it’s safe.

Guess what? It’s not.

After some initial wild teenage party-harty-ing, the kids stumble across a bunch of leather and rusty metal wearing savages, who are super mean, so in order to survive, the cool teens are forced to become even cooler by becoming warlords. After that, it’s a teenage wasteland, just a teenage wasteland…

That’s the show.

Look, I’m not gonna pretend like The 100 wasn’t awesome in the super dumb way that pretty much all of the CW shows are, because it was. I watched all seven seasons. But let’s be clear here… it was super dumb. I mean, Octavia’s character arc alone is just so…dumb. It’s so dumb! Whatever. My point is, The 100 was basically the Mall Food Court of the Television landscape.

But I digress…

Anyway, Polaris has one of the same core world-building problem as The 100…

On the 100, there’s a ton of issues, like when you find out the entire first 3 seasons took place over the course of 100 days, but more than that… in the 100 years since the nuclear war and the 100 cool teens landing on Earth, all the barbarians who lived through the post nuclear apocalypse environment have become this asinine mix of Mad Max rip-offs, medieval barbarians, and the usual problematic indigenous people tropes, and they all speak one of those “real” gibberish languages I mentioned above, having mostly forgotten English.

The problem is… the 100 is set on America’s eastern seaboard, a predominantly English speaking area, and it’s only been 100 years since the fall of their even more futuristic society than our current one, two or three generations at the most. Because of this, there should still be people alive on the planet who either remember the “old” world because they actually lived in it, or they remember a parent or loved one who did, someone who, at some point, would’ve said to them “Honey… honey, no! Take that shit off your head, baby. That’s a hubcap, sweetie, not a hat… mmm-mmm-mm, what a god damn simpleton… That boy got a bit too much radiation in his mama’s womb, that’s his problem.”

The 100’s problem is that there just hasn’t been enough time for so much cultural knowledge to have been lost. On top of that, there’s no way these survivors could’ve not only come up with a brand new language, but were then able to spread it between dozens of warring tribes, so that it is now the unquestioned primary language of the area. There’s no way that happened, let alone that they also “forgot” how to speak English. It’s just not enough time.

500 years? Sure. 100? Get the fuck outta here.

I bring this all up, because Polaris is set in 2144. That’s only 120 years away, which isn’t enough time for humanity to completely lose all recognizable languages. Worst of all, the filmmakers tell you what the year is. They didn’t have to. They could’ve just left it vague, but they didn’t, so here I sit… broken hearted…

That’s frustrating.

I was also really disappointed that at no point in the film did Mama Bear show up and just polar bear the shit out of the bad guys, but… I guess you can’t always get what you want, right? But… you can try sometimes, and you just might find.. you get what you need… Which is how I feel about Polaris.

Yes, it might a little long, but for a low budget sci-fi post apocalyptic adventure without much dialogue, Polaris is pretty well done.

I enjoyed it.