Netflix’s action movie Black Crab turns ice skating into a crucial post-apocalyptic skill

polygon.com:

The press materials for Netflix’s Swedish-import action movie Black Crab say it’s set in a post-apocalyptic world, and that does communicate the look and feel of this grimly stylish military thriller. But “post-apocalyptic” is still a bit of a misnomer. It’s mid-apocalyptic, really, and the apocalypse onscreen isn’t a plague, an alien invasion, or an environmental catastrophe. It’s a war — a conventional, brutal war that’s been going on for years.

The geopolitics of this situation are kept intentionally obscure. In an opening flashback, a car radio mentions rioting, “both sides” blaming each other, and the start of a civil war. The setting seems to be Sweden. The enemy is only ever referred to as “the enemy.” To the extent viewers can tell, it feels more like a society turned on itself than a clash of cultures or nations, but no ideological rift is ever explained. Whatever set off the conflict must have been serious, because the society is nearing complete destruction.

All this lack of detail is presumably intended to underline how meaninglessness the conflict is, or to keep audiences from getting bogged down in their personal political opinions about the war. But really, it just feels like a failure of imagination that makes the film itself feel meaningless: a bleak disquisition on how war is hell, but also looks kind of cool.

Noomi Rapace, as steely and collected as she was in the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, plays Caroline Edh, a soldier recruited for a secret mission, the “operation Black Crab” of the title. It’s a bitter midwinter, and her side is losing the war. They’re almost totally cut off, and their only hope to turn the tide is to get two mysterious canisters to a research station on a remote island.