British explorer Ernest Shackleton had foresight. This is especially worth noting since the final expedition of his career was an abject failure — except in what it proved about the resilience of the human body and spirit.
"The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition" shares its name with the ship that brought Shackleton's 28 crewmen, their dog teams and a stowaway Argentine cat to the Southern Polar region where they would be trapped for nearly two years. Not only did endurance mark the men's remarkable ordeal and result in all hands' survival, but Shackleton had enough prescience to bring a professional filmmaker and photographer, the Australian Frank Hurley, along on the 1914 adventure.
More than 100 of Hurley's pictures and a good deal of 35mm film footage was salvaged from the disaster/triumph, and they provide some of the most compelling images in this beautiful and stirring documentary. Director George Butler ("Pumping Iron") augments the archival material with gorgeous recent footage taken in the far South Atlantic and some apparent re-enactments, as well as interviews with the Endurance endurers' descendants.
While many details emerge — exactly how shifting ice floes can slowly smash a sturdy ship, what an exclusive diet of penguin and seal meat do to men's stomach's (and heads) over the course of many months, what constitutes an act of mutiny under the most extreme (and not, necessarily, nautical) circumstances and much more — the overriding picture that comes into focus is of a man who probably wasn't a very good explorer but proved to be as superb a leader as the British Empire has ever produced.
After all, an apparently imperturbable Shackleton led his men long enough through the valley of a shadow cloaked in the most chilling of white-out conditions. They portaged their lifeboats, killed their beloved dogs one by one, crossed stormy seas to the equally inhospitable Elephant Island and then, in one boat under Shackleton's command, a small party navigated through a hurricane to reach the nearest inhabited rock. And that wasn't even the end of their ordeal.
While it properly, and with admirable restraint, admires the stamina and character strength that enabled the men to all come through the worst nature had to throw at them, the movie also acknowledges that many of them were lost to the butchery running wild in more temperate climes — leaving us to contemplate just what such seemingly simple ideas as survival and command might actually mean.
"The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition" is rated G. Running time: 93 minutes.