National Geographic’s latest documentary movie is a spectacle of modern technology and adventure, but I think you’ll enjoy it best by pairing it with a 20-year-old hit drama series.
Released onto Disney Plus and Hulu on Friday, November 1, Endurance is the movie in question. It follows the 2022 voyage of a team of scientists and adventurers to locate the shipwreck of the Endurance, a boat lost over a century before in the Weddell Sea near Antarctica.
The Endurance was lost in Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated 1914 attempt to cross the South Pole, and for 100 years we’ve had only faint ideas as to where it actually lies. That changes in Endurance, which compares its modern-day scientists and technicians to Shackleton himself in their daring attempts to locate the vessel before the ice floes trap them in the Weddell Gyre.
I saw Endurance at the London Film Festival in October 2024 and found it a fascinating look at this hero of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, while also showing how the spirit of adventure is still alive in the polar regions today. But coming out of the screening, I found myself fascinated to find out more about the explorer himself: Ernest Shackleton.
My first port of call was by watching South, the documentary which resulted from footage taken during the expedition (yes, the 1914 crew included a videographer) and was recently remastered by the British Film Institute.
But I still wanted more after that, and found myself stumbling upon a well-received TV show that I hadn’t heard of before.
This show is Shackleton, first broadcast by the UK’s Channel 4 in 2002.
Starring actor Kenneth Branagh as the titular explorer, Shackleton is a 206-minute story (broadcast in a different number of instalments in different countries) that charts the 1914 voyage of the man. The first half looks at his attempts to raise funds for the voyage while planning it, and the latter half focuses on how the expedition went wrong and the crew’s attempts to survive in the face of the odds.
Shackleton was evidently beloved when it came out several decades ago: it was nominated for Emmy, BAFTA and Golden Globe awards, and enjoys a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Watching Shackleton helped me understand the story of Endurance in a different way; while the Nat Geo documentary does tell the tale of the 1914 expedition, it doesn’t go into nearly as much detail (or give the figures a human face) as Shackleton does. Plus the movie makes the odd choice to get creepy-sounding AI reproductions of the real crew members to read their journal entries, which strips humanity from their stories, and I liked being able to see real actors inhabit each crewmember.
Unfortunately Shackleton isn’t readily available to watch everywhere. In the UK it’s free to watch on Channel 4 (with people travelling abroad able to use streaming VPNs to watch it) but it’s not streaming in many other places. In the US it was broadcast by A&E Network and now doesn’t seem to be online, which is the case in most other places I checked.
