The highlight is the mind-blowing photography. Shot after shot after shot is magnificent, impressive, beautiful and perfect. It doesn't have the emotional impact of The Cranes Are Flying (whose star, Tatyana Samojlova, is here again, looking radiant as ever), but it's a gripping, pulse-pounding tale. It's also thankfully pretty light on the propoganda, unlike Kalatozov's most famous movie I Am Cuba. Chalk up one more masterpiece whose absence on DVD is a crime.

excellent cinematography, but the story was terrible

A film that is, through dire circumstances, a testament to the tenacity of the human spirit and its capacity for love and despair, exploration and perseverance. Those are a bunch of cheesy terms, I know, but they are communicated with such expressive clarity. This is some of the most gorgeous cinematography I've ever seen. My only reservation is that these ideas occasionally seem to be tethered to an off-putting sense of national pride, but it's not overwhelming propaganda.

Those Soviets sure knew how to move some pictures.

For me, the story worked: the first half shows how human selfishness and fraility stifles those barely unattainable Soviet templates for human perfection; the second half shows nature as a killer who offs those who don't meet the cut. There's some intellectual meat to that social / moral agenda. The cinematography will make you weep.

Visually magnificent depiction of the price of human progress. While the film was clearly made with the Soviet Union in mind the story works in a broader context, and the beauty of the film transcends any propagandist aims. Wonderful from start to finish.

Hang it on a fucking wall.

A definite contender of my "Best Cinematography in Film Award", but other than that, what's so spectacular about the film? The story is substance-less, unsatisfying, and bland. And the subplot including two male geologists fighting over the female geologist ends with one of them falling into a ditch. Or something. I forgot a lot about the film.

A work of brazen uniqueness; it's the kind of thing I love about the Thaw era of Soviet Cinema. Everything that's great about nature on film is on display here; rain, fire, snow, wind, and any other element you can imagine is hurled upon our heroes in the most visually stunning fashion. The cinematography is easily among the best ever; every shot is something you've never seen before. Here in 2011, I'm not even sure the industry has caught up to the level of filmic mastery found in this movie.

One of the most visually stunning films ever made, but I have to admit that storytelling is not that satisfying.