Iceman the movie: stone age survivor Ötzi is brought back to life

No corpse has ever been examined so thoroughly, attracted so many admirers, or spawned such an array of relics and souvenirs. The mummified Neolithic male known as Ötzi, whose shrivelled body was discovered with his tools and clothing in a glacier 26 years ago, is now set to experience a further wave of popularity with the release of a biopic offering a fictional account of his life.

Ötzi’s remains were stumbled across by a German couple, Erika and Helmut Simon, during a summer hike in 1991 in the Ötztal Alps in southern Tyrol. So well preserved was the partially thawed body, the couple initially thought the corpse, nicknamed Ötzi after the valley where it was found, to be relatively new. But forensic tests soon established it to be around 5,300-years-old, making Ötzi the oldest known human mummy. The corpse’s organs, even its skin – covered in 60 tattoos – were intact, making it a unique find and one of the most prized archaeological discoveries of all time.Ötzi has long since become a cause célèbre in the scientific world, with thousands of specialists examining everything from the contents of his stomach to how he died.

But the Stone Age hunter – who was felled by an arrow that penetrated his left shoulder, causing him to fall and hit his head on a stone, after which he bled to death – has proved just as popular as a tourist attraction. He draws around a quarter of a million visitors every year to the museum in the mountain town of Bolzano, northern Italy, where he is on display in a specially devised cold chamber. He has proved such a lure over the past two decades that the museum, which can only house 300 people, is soon to move to new premises to cope with visitor demand.

Inspired by Ötzi’s cult status and much of the rich information that scientists have gathered about him and the way in which he lived, German filmmaker Felix Randau has now turned Ötzi’s struggle for survival into a feature film, which is out this month. Der Mann aus dem Eis (Iceman), a collaboration between Germany, Italy and Austria, was shot in the rugged mountains of Bavaria, South Tyrol and Carinthia.

“The figure of Ötzi, with his mythical grandeur, allowed us to look into the past to see what it tells us about the present,” Randau said in an interview. “It raises the question as to whether humans have really changed at all and developed over 5,000 years.” The film speculates why Ötzi was murdered, the exact details of which are a mystery, despite many theories offered by archaeologists and scientists.

Played by the German actor Jürgen Vogel, Ötzi – or Kelab, as he is known in the film – speaks an early version of the Rhaetic tongue, a language of the pre-Roman and Roman era in the eastern Alps, for which no translation is given in the film. Kelab lives with goats and pigs, wears animal furs for warmth, and traverses a perilous snowy landscape as he tries to protect himself and his family from the elements and human enemies, while rituals and hunting define his life.

Critics have so far reserved most of their praise for the cinematography. “Spectacular locations and pure story telling,” said Screen Daily’s film critic, while Der Spiegel magazine said the film had succeeded in underlining the universal fascination for Ötzi, who “is our bridge to the beginning of humanity” and central to “the search for the origins of our own species”.

But scientists have been less complimentary. Spektrum der Wissenschaft, a scientific magazine, said Randau had missed an opportunity to celebrate “the cultural achievements that science has discovered”, such as how Ötzi made his bows and arrows, gathered his food and made his leather garments.

But the South Tyrol archaeological museum, which has attracted 4.6 million visitors so far, and whose experts acted as advisers to the film-makers, is now bracing itself for a fresh influx of tourists following the release of the film in the three countries, according to Angelika Fleckinger, director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology. “People are fascinated by the man from the ice – they cannot get enough of him,” she said.

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Souvenir shops in Bolzano have reportedly been stocking up on new items to add to the array of Ötzi memorabilia, including Ötzi mugs, T-shirts, key-rings and iceman mummy jelly babies.

But a shadow hangs over the iceman’s future, with the experts responsible for keeping Ötzi in as pristine a state as when he was discovered in 1991 issuing a warning amid the euphoria. They suggest that the archaeological treasure’s days may be numbered: he is in serious danger of disintegrating because of over-exposure to both public and scientists. Those who closely monitor the amount of moisture in his body say that, despite their efforts to keep him properly hydrated, Ötzi, who only weighs around 13kg, is losing around two grams a day as he gradually dries out. They say he may have to be removed from public display and packed into ice once again to preserve him.

Every two months the body is sprayed by forensic scientist Oliver Peschel with a fine layer of water and cooled to form a thin ice layer which covers the entire body, including every fold in the skin. But the hydrating process appears inadequate, as indicated by the weight loss. In addition, there is a fear that microbes might attack the tissue of Ötzi’s body, despite the safety measures being taken. “If we’re not extremely careful, Ötzi will go bad on us,” Peschel said recently.

Albert Zink, head of Bolzano’s institute for mummy research, who has spent considerable time examining Ötzi, says scientists are in a dilemma. They want to carry out far more research but also to keep Ötzi accessible to the public – without irreparably damaging one of the greatest archaeological finds. “We are far from being finished with him,” said the anthropologist, who has also worked on other mummies, notably the corpse of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, discovered in 1922.

Extraordinary detail about Ötzi has been revealed over the past quarter of a century by researchers, from physicists and botanists to doctors and geologists, who have compiled about 800 academic papers on the corpse. They have established everything from Ötzi’s eye colour (brown) to the fact that he would have been around 45 when he died on a spring day (after analysis of the pollen found in his stomach).

Not only was he lactose intolerant, but he had calcified arteries, whipworm eggs in his intestines, and fleas, as well as tooth decay, inflamed gums, Lyme disease, gallstones and probably suffered from backache. And the fatal arrow that hit his shoulder was fired from a distance of around 30 metres.

There is still a long list of researchers waiting to carry out experiments on samples of the corpse – one has even requested tissue samples to establish whether Ötzi experimented with natural hallucinators. But many requests are declined, especially from people –mainly from the US – trying to compare their DNA with that of Ötzi.