Over his long career, Michael Anderson has directed dozens of films, becoming more and more old-fashioned than secondary. It seems that in the 1990s he finally lost the former skills of a strong middle peasant, so it is natural that he began to connect only to television projects.
Filmed from the book “The Trial of Love in Alaska” is an eloquent example of this statement. The main character of the film, stern as a brick, and real as an expiring salary, personifies the true spirit of romance, which trails behind him as far as Alaska itself. Here, even the classical Hollywood thesis is observed that the hero-lover must necessarily be well-lived and a little dented, it is this that can captivate the heroine, guaranteeing her family happiness. Art Hindle is trying very hard to get used to such a character, but it turns out that it is somehow not very. However, all the other characters are also barely intended types, so it is extremely difficult, if at all, to empathize with them in the film, although the film develops from a melodramatic plot in the style of “I will take you to the tundra” to the drama of survival in extremely harsh conditions. But this is where the director makes the main mistake. Imagine what kind of movie you could make about a heroine left alone in the wild, and also pregnant in addition. However, Anderson crumpled this part monstrously. The heroine is like in a scout camp of minimal complexity, everything she does is quite skillful, skills arise by themselves. Having spoken all the difficulties and main trials of the heroine with some ridiculous editing tongue-in-cheek, the director leaves us in complete perplexity. One would expect a thriller-like aesthetic from the film, but instead we got a straight-line melodrama about real men and women, which, if you look now, is not in megacities, but in the wild, where they are found as a kind of endemic species in the expanses of secondary directing.