Review: The Terror Is Icy Cold Suspense
- Jun 4, 2018
- 3 min read
Take Master And Commander, and a sprinkle of Predator and John Carpenter's The Thing, and you have yourself a historical thriller unlike any other.
During an attempt to find the North-West Passage, British ships The HMS Erebus and The HMS Terror find themselves trapped within the ice, frozen and unable to progress. With supplies running low, Captains Francis Crozier (Jared Harris) and John Franklin (Ciarin Hinds) find themselves on the receiving end of a situation growing ever more dire. As the crews grow unhappy, notably one Cornelius Hickey (Adam Nagaitis), and the ships doctor, Harry Goodsir (Paul Ready), finds something that will only hasten their demise, it seems things cannot get worse. Little do they know however, that they're not alone. Something far worse than any man lurks within the snow and ice, something that's hunting them.
There's something about blood and snow, a visual that will never cease to entertain. Maybe it's the representation of death staining what was once pure, or the stark contrast between crimson and white. Whatever it may be, it's difficult to deny that it's one of cinema's greatest forms of storytelling. And within the 10 episodes of The Terror, blood and snow tells a lot of stories. Tales of murder, of vengeance, of the unstoppable cold, the madness of beasts and the anger of men. It's the kind of stuff that'll make you pull that blanket a little closer, not because your scared, but because the Arctic winds reach out from the screen, weaving their icy path toward you.
There is little warmth on display here, save for a select few characters. The Terror is a story of hard men doing a hard job, and paying for it dearly. And it's these men that form the centre of the show. All played to near perfection, the characters feel like real people, with no easily defined line between good...and less good, for none of them are really evil, only varying levels of desperate. Harris, Nagaitis and Ready stand out most clearly as they deliver powerful performances, bring much of the pieces' emotion and drive the story along. Each of them provide a different perspective, a different view of the world, and tell their own story. Hinds' performance is also great, while it lasts, for if one thing is certain in The Terror, it's that no one is around for very long. But it isn't the characters and actors who are the real stars here.
As cruel and horrible as men can be, their actions can, on occasion, be justified. They may have acted out of fear, out of desperation or simply to survive. For Mother Nature however, there is no reasoning. The cold is the biggest threat, more so than the monster that hunts the crews. Men freeze, they drown in icy water, are driven mad by the hopeless landscape that surrounds them, all rendered in that stark white beauty of snow and ice. The Terror is quite a graphic show, though the most painful wounds come not at the end of a gun or blade, nor from the grasping claws of the beast, but from the all too real cold. The creature, known as Tuunbaq, doesn't hurt either, being one of the more interesting monsters around, riding a fine line between real and supernatural, and the way in which its own story plays out is quite fascinating.
The Terror is the kind of television that sits with. It's the kind of entertainment that, when you read into the real events that inspired it, starts to feel uncomfortably real. It bares few, if any similarities to any single entity and, as such, makes for a riveting watch. Definitely give it a watch, just keep the fire stoked and close to hand.
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