Smilla's Sense of Snow

Bomb Rating: 

Only when the secret was revealed did it dawn on me that "Smilla's Sense of Snow" could be abbreviated to mean "Smilla's S.O.S." -- a cry for help that echoed my own.

Watching "Smilla's Sense of Snow" is a lot like going into the hospital for a routine check-up and then waking up to discover that Nurse Ratchett has mistakenly amputated one of your legs.

Given that this film is supposedly about Smilla and her Inuit sense of inner turmoil (as if Inuits were the only ones cursed with inner turmoil), director Bille ("House of the Spirits") August had better have one hell of a good excuse -- Mad Cow disease, traumatic UFO abduction experience, the bad Copenhagen water -- for making a movie that leaves audiences feeling like they just had an "X-Files" tape shoved surreptitiously up their rectums.

The movie's mystery is this: Why did a little boy fall off the roof where Smilla Jaspersen (Julia Ormond) lives? Would you believe that mysterious green aliens from another planet beamed down from their spaceship and threw him off to see how high humans would bounce? Of course you wouldn't, but the actual answer to the mystery is nearly as absurd -- it's not that far off from Bobby Ewing levitating from the icy Greenlandic waters and screaming, "It was all a dream!"

Only when the secret was revealed did it dawn on me that "Smilla's Sense of Snow" could be abbreviated to mean "Smilla's S.O.S." -- a cry for help that echoed my own sense of inner turmoil as I realized I had utterly wasted the last two hours.

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