Saturday, November 9, 2019

Climate Change vs. Eco-Terrorism in The Thaw (2009)




The Thaw begins to illustrate the magnitude of those sacrifices by personalizing them. For example the entrance of the Dr. Kruipen’s daughter Evelyn (Martha MacIsaac) as one of three student interns chosen to work with the team amplifies the force of Dr. Kruipen’s eco-terrorist inclinations. We learn that Kruipen and his daughter have conflicts associated with work and divorce that Evelyn hopes to resolve. The film takes the time to explore how her father’s work and absence result in both anger with and connection to him. Before her arrival at the Arctic camp, for example, Evelyn declares to the other student interns, “Honestly, I think that people are incapable of change, and their days are numbered.” Despite his poor parenting skills, Kruipen attempts to stop Evelyn from joining the team and being exposed to the parasites, suggesting that personal connections could influence humans’ actions toward both human and nonhuman nature. 



The Thaw also draws on the suspense of the horror genre to slowly expose the biological effects caused by parasites unleashed from the prehistoric mammoth, displaying the monstrous results of their infestation in both animals and humans. As Noel Murray of the A.V. Club declares, “The Thaw sports some genuinely scary bug effects.” First the polar bear dies after ingesting parasites from the Woolly Mammoth. Team members exposed to the parasites start exhibiting symptoms of infection, and when Jane discovers Kruipen’s plan, she shoots and wounds him and kills the other researchers to stop the spread of the parasite, returns to camp and sabotages their helicopter. When the student interns arrive at the base camp and find the rotting polar bear carcass, they and their pilot Bart (Viv Leacock) also become infected with horrific results.



In one scene, for example, student researcher Ling Chen (Steph Song) is bitten after making love in a sleeping bag. She declares, “it’s just a bug,” but the next day she is covered with bites. Now quarantined in a base camp bed, Jane’s symptoms have also worsened. Black bile comes out of her mouth as she tells everyone to leave. When they examine Jane’s body, they find bug bites and eggs, and parasites begin to climb out of her eye. Ling and the others suffer similar fates. Even when Bart chops off his infected arm, the parasites linger. Seemingly immune, Evelyn wonders “how long they stay in the larval state” and explains that they are prehistoric infectious parasites that thawed with the ice.



Instead of the climate change that unearthed deadly parasites, however, the film seems to suggest that the real horror of the film is Dr. Kruipen’s eco-terrorist plan. As evidence for this connection between eco-terrorism and horror, Evelyn is appalled when she discovers his scheme while watching her father’s video diary, hearing him explain that he will expose others to the parasite, one of the horrors that will come from global warming, because “no one cares.” She watches him cut himself, providing an entry site for a parasite to bury itself quickly. Because Evelyn has seen the ramifications of exposure to this deadly parasite, she leaves her father to die in the base camp and returns home to warn scientists and the American public about the horrific ramifications of Anthropogenic Era climate change. “I used to believe that people couldn't change; that all we could do is have as much fun as we could before it all came to an end. And now, now I don't want it to end,” she explains, perhaps providing some hope until, in the film’s last scene, a hunting dog finds a parasite-ridden bird near an urban area.


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