Six Korean adventurers are on a mission to reach some obscure point in the Antarctic. Why? Because it's there. Look, I never understood it myself, this need to go to the balls-freezing testicles-frosticles poles or to be at "the top of the world". Leo DiCrapio was on top of the world WITHOUT having to climb Everest, right? If that little wimp (sorry, DJANGO tough guy) can do it, then even his Dusseldorf granny can.
Several days into the mission, a weird little alien (?) eye peeks out of the food they're eating. A few days later, a big elephant/creature/whatever eye sits in a crevice, staring at the luckless schmuck that fell into it right after attacking the annoying glasses-wearing nerd. (What's a nerd doing on a polar expedition?). Both those scenes are early on in AJ, setting the viewer up for a supernatural horror mystery. Or?
Think again. This could have been yet another drama about a man's descent into madness, had they taken out those two scenes, and perhaps one or two others that carry supernatural implications. For some strange reason, AJ (no relation to the putz from that boy band) almost completely neglects the supernatural in the second half, focusing instead solely on the "Captain" and the very obvious fact that he'd lost all of his marbles at some point.
Well, at least it should have been obvious – though not to the remaining three team-members. For whatever reasons, they kept following his suicide-mission orders with a minimum of fuss or skepticism until it was (predictably) too late. The act of cutting off the rope holding one of their team-members hanging in the crevice: that alone should have sounded alarm bells in their polar-exploring/snow-loving heads, not to mention his subsequent behaviour (half of which would have been enough to land him in a loony bin for a lengthy period of time). The way that actor plays the Captain - it should have been plain as day that he'd gone insane, and yet these other guys only reach agreement on this piece of bleedin'-obvious trivia once they arrive at the British hut. Perhaps this is a Korean thing, dunno, to be loyal to your superior(s) until the bitter end. That would certainly help explain the almost unique phenomenon of North Koreans not putting up much resistance against one of the harshest tyrannies in human history, whereas that same government would have been brought down a long time ago in any European country – and I mean ANY. (Not even the Russians would have tolerated it.) The way they all follow "Captain" into what is evidently a pointless suicide mission might be therefore more logical, or at least more familiar, to Korean viewers. I am not having a go at Koreans, but merely speculating.
It is a pity that the source of Captain's insanity wasn't explored more. Merely suggesting that "Antarctica drove him mad", or that his kid fell from the 14th floor many years ago, is not good enough. The parallels to the fate of the 1922 British expedition, the journal, the hallucinations, and of course the two bizarre eyes: all of these are just much-too-small parts in a much larger puzzle which the movie simply won't allow us to put together, or to at least know where to begin. I don't think that a movie of this kind should either serve us ALL of the answers on a plate as if treating the viewers like a bunch of avatards, nor do I believe that the vagueness should go too far in the other direction. The brilliance of movies that strike a balance – a fine line – between these two extremes cannot be overstated. Clearly, AJ has failed in this. Perhaps it was lazy writing, perhaps it was a lack of ideas how to resolve the movie's grand enigma, or perhaps the writer thought that utter confusion would eventually lead the viewer into some kind of a deep Buddhist trance that would help make all of this comprehensible on some deeper religious or (and I absolutely detest using this word) spiritual (yuck) level.
Ultimately, AJ's strengths lie in the beautiful landscapes, the mood, the solid soundtrack, the several fairly memorable scenes, and the sense of mystery. The slow pace will definitely put off avatards and other jamesocameronian riff-raff, but I didn't feel as if there was any tedium. The letdown, as is so often the case, is that the mystery was just a paper-tiger, a parlor trick, a gimmick to keep you interested for the duration. The movie has no real conclusion; it's far too open for interpretation, as open as the pooka of a 59 year-old prostitute, i.e. too vague to make any sense - apart from any subjective drivel that any ambitious/hopeful viewer might very pretentiously/optimistically/deludedly offer as an explanation. Looking forward to reading the other comments here for the usual silly theories!
A solid try, but next time more work should go into the script and the basic premise. Perhaps injecting a POINT to everything might help. AJ does not have an open ending – it has NO ending. You can't go off into too many directions within the framework of one single story. Take one direction and run with it. Or walk slowly with it through snow; that works too.
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