At the start of the movie, Marcus has broken into a downtown Seattle office. He has what looks like a cigarette lighter (I'm told that's called a "flash drive"), which he uses to download important data from a computer. And he's not kidding around; someone dies before we see the other main characters.
Valerie divorced Claire's father when Claire was 7, and they live with her mother Carol. Now Claire is 13 and rebellious, but basically good. She has diabetes and must rely on an insulin pump.
Valerie's latest boyfriend Steve (who may be the one) works for a drug company which is about to discover an important treatment for pancreatic cancer. He seems to be rich, and he is quite caring. But he will never be good enough for Claire.
Valerie, Claire and Steve are going on vacation in Alaska, and they will get to take Steve's private plane. Well, not Steve. He has important work to do, possibly relating to that cancer treatment. But Marcus comes along. He's really nice and his knowledge proves valuable on the trip.
Over a remote but beautiful area of The Yukon, the plane gets in trouble and has to make an emergency landing. And snow is coming. Now what?
I think pretty much everyone does a good job here. The standout performances in this movie are those of Leslie Easterbrook as Valerie's frantic mother, and the actor playing the pilot. Nicole Munoz is quite good too.
The first half of the movie, despite a couple of deaths, makes this appear to be a family adventure in the tradition of "Lassie" and Disney movies. But don't be fooled. The movie's tone changes dramatically during the search and rescue. However, I think the V-chip rating of TV-14 that I saw may have been overly cautious. My feeling about this rating is that sometimes perfectly clean family adventures might get a TV-PG-V, so some additional caution is justified here. There is enough violence to be a concern.
There are some really exciting scenes, especially the plane crash, and some danger in the wilderness. The main characters handle themselves quite well, though, and mother and daughter get to know each other and work out their differences in some really pleasant scenes. There is even occasional comedy.
The biggest fault, in my opinion, is that the writers seemed to forget about Claire's diabetes about half the time. Doesn't the average healthy teen have a hard time waking up cheerful in the morning? There are also some inconsistencies as the snow moves closer to the lost family. I suppose it's possible to have no snow at all five miles from where everything is covered.
Overall, I enjoyed it.
