A self-consciously “weird” movie (never a good thing in my book) movie which suffers primarily from self-consciously “quirky” characters obviously invented by a Wes Anderson fan: a family with a strong, domineering patriarch and a mess of brothers and sisters each of which is a distinct “character”, and each with more personality than four real life people would collectively have.
Anyway, this quirky family’s patriarch, a distiller, has discovered a cache of 117 year old whiskey from the Shackleford expedition in Antarctica. Oh, because the movie is “weird”, one of the casks contains a mummified but somehow not-quite-dead expedition member who somehow got the power to live forever and blast other people with radioactive beams from his face, and is apparently waiting on some sort of extraterrestrial connection, and is pretty soon stumbling around—drunk from being in a whiskey cask for 177 years, isn’t that quirky?—shooting rays and flying int the sky and other inexplicable stuff. Also, the sister of the family is pregnant, and suffering from a fatal disease, so the third act can have its share of sentimentality and pathos. As I said, it’s all very Wes Anderson, and I know I’m in the minority but that’s not a selling point to me.
It’s a Canadian movie, which probably accounts for why it’s all slightly better and more entertaining than I’m making that sound—but only slightly better. If it hadn’t been made by Canadians it probably would have been entirely unsufferable, instead of just kind of.
But, overally, sorry, the “Look at me, I’m a movie about quirky people who absurd fantasy things happen to, it doesn’t make sense so it must be smart” just doesn’t do much for me, though.