Here is a frustrating film that tries to tell two stories at once, and succeeds with neither. It’s the story of explorer Ernest Shackleton’s epic Antarctic ordeal in 1915 and how he and his crew had somehow to journey to safety after their ship, the Endurance, sank. It’s also the story of how this ship was finally discovered by a hi-tech logistics team in 2022, 3,000 metres down at the bottom of the Weddell Sea near the Antarctic Peninsula. It juxtaposes Shackleton’s extraordinary battle to survive with the modern-day scientists’ struggle to locate the Endurance wreck, with tiggerish Dan Snow on board bouncing amiably about – and it is a pretty glib alignment.
Furthermore, the black-and-white footage taken at the time by Shackleton’s famous embedded cinematographer Frank Hurley has been colourised, and passages from the journals of Shackleton and others are read aloud by AI-generated voices, taken (evidently) from existing recordings by the actual adventurers themselves; this is a presumptuous and flashy way of gussying the whole drama up.
Splitting the focus between past and present has the indirect effect of showing that the strains on the modern-day explorers are of course nowhere near as awful as those suffered by the Shackleton crew. Snow et al look slightly self-congratulatory, especially as the supposed element of tension – will they find the wreck or have to turn back? – is so obviously superfluous. It would have been better, I suspect, simply to recount the modern-day exploration, which is interesting enough, with more sparing use of the Shackleton backstory – although it should be admitted that some of their Shackleton material is interesting and original. The final discovery of the Endurance wreck itself makes for some amazing and eerie images, but we don’t get enough of them. They’re the most compelling thing about the film but they’re hardly there.
• Endurance screened at the London film festival and is in UK cinemas from 14 October.
