text: The things that I find irritating on screen, the things I nitpick about and annoy the people who try to watch movies with me are those moment where the writer, director, set-designer, on screen caterer, or whoever, doesn't think it through to the end and, by a single act of omission - or commission - undoes all the other work done by everyone else who has worked on the movie. That moment of "Wait a bloody minute.... What just happened?" that stops the narrative dead in its tracks. (Not that this film's narrative needed a lot of stopping, because anyone who has ever seen it will know that Quintet's narrative drive has pretty well frozen solid before the end of the opening shot.) There are several of those moments in this movie. And you get so long to think about them too. The film is two hours long and the scripted dialogue probably ran to five pages. There's a lot of time to ponder its deficiencies.<br /><br />The movie is set in a frozen Earth. Another ice age has set in and the whole world is dying. It's cold. Very cold. It's actually very cold on the screen. The movie was shot in Canada in winter and there are icicles and real snow and people's breath misting from their mouths in every scene. Time and again we are reminded how fecking cold it is. People wear big hats and layers and layers of clothes and waddle around like over-dressed Weeble people. Must have been a horrible shoot. My nitpick comes in a sequence when our hero checks into a room of a hotel. Woken up in the middle of the night by voices coming from the room next door, he overhears a conversation of vital importance to the meagre plot through an large grill in the wall dividing the two rooms. I'm not questioning why there is a convenient grill in the wall between the two rooms. What got me annoyed was the fact that the grill had not been blocked up by the long term tenant with the noisy visitor. If you are trying to keep warm the last thing you need is a huge gaping draughty hole in your wall that leads into an unoccupied unheated room. Trust me. I live like this, I watched this film sat on my living-room sofa under a duvet with a hot water bottle. My breath was misting as much as the actors'. If that whacking great hole was in my wall I'd block it up with something. Maybe not the best choice of movie to watch in an unheated room in midwinter but boy did it make me notice the lousy insulation in the film.