The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

"The Endurance" is one of the most amazing, unforgettable movies I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot of movies.) I wish I could require everyone to see it. "The Endurance" makes a mockery of most of what passes for action-adventure. It leaves comic book movies like 2008's "The Dark Knight," in its dust.

"The Endurance" tells the story of Ernest Shackleton's alternately miraculous and disastrous Antarctic expedition of 1914. For the bulk of the film's runtime, I was on the edge of my seat, gasping, overwhelmed by the horror and magnitude of the nightmarish conditions Shackleton and his men confronted. The men, stuck in Antarctica, watch their ship, their sole sure escape, crushed into a pile of toothpicks by heaving chunks of ice. A man wakes in the middle of the night to realize that the ice under his tent has shifted; he plunges, in his sleeping bag, into Antarctic Ocean. Sled dogs go from being trusted allies and team members to something starving men debate eating. These conditions didn't last for an hour or a day or a month, but for over a year.

Bad luck is followed by almost miraculous momentary deliverance. At one desperate point, the fate of his men hanging on his ability to carry out an almost impossible task – walking non-stop for 36 hours across unmapped cliffs, mountains, and glaciers, after months of malnutrition and under-using the muscles in his legs – Shackleton is convinced that a supernatural companion accompanies him. Mary Crean O'Brien, daughter of Tom Crean, who also made this trek with Shackleton, insists that that ghostly companion had been sent by "the man upstairs." One may scoff, but in this trek, Shackleton just missed a blizzard that, had he had to walk through it, would have certainly killed him. But what about all the bad luck that damned Shackleton and his men to their icy prison? This is a film that has you asking the big questions. Why do men do these crazy things? What does suffering mean, especially given how hard some people seek it out? Are these men greater than the rest of us, or merely mad? Where are frontiers, and heroes like this today? "Endurance" gets you thinking about culture. The British Empire gets a bad rap, but it did train its men to be honorable, and to live up to a code of conduct. Shackleton and his men were stoic, self-sacrificing, and learned to transcend class and ethnic differences. I had to wonder how a group of youths trained by our current values of whining, victimization, selfishness, identity politics and deviance would have responded under a similar catastrophe.

The film is beautiful to look at. The filmmakers traveled to the Antarctic and complement Frank Hurley's, antique, black-and-white film footage and still photographs with modern, color footage. The effect is mesmerizing. The modern film footage plunges you into the Antarctic; you will feel cold. You will contemplate turquoise shadows on pure white icebergs, ice-choked sea, and blizzards as aesthetic phenomena, as guardians of the last frontier, and as enemies who want to stop the blood in your veins and suck your body several fathoms down.

I have to confess that I found this film hard to watch. And I couldn't stop watching it. After it was done, I really needed time to decompress. Moment after moment juggles human lives and fates. I'll never forget this film, though, and its demonstration of the power of the human spirit.

If you need something to remind you how incredible, brave and courageous people can be under the most impossible conditions, there are few better places to explore than the hell on earth experienced by Shackleton and his band of adventurers and how they escaped its frozen grasp.

I have read several books about Shackleton's amazing expedition to Antarctica. I first became aware of the story from a PBS documentary several years ago, and being amazed by the story of survival and endurance, sought out books for more of the story. As a teacher I have used parts of this story as examples of leadership, enduring hardship, teamwork, loyalty, service, and hope. Being so familiar with this story, I wasn't sure what would be new in the film, but there was plenty there for me to enjoy and still learn about. I found it interesting that the descendants of survivors consistently said that their relatives, as is common from many trying circumstances, rarely talked about the events. It was also great to see the pictures I have seen over and over again put into a format where I could see them on a big screen. Even more amazing is the surviving film footage from the expedition. The preservation of this footage is wonderful, and in conjunction with the newly filmed footage of the unchanged antarctic landscape, gives you a better understanding of the wilderness these men were up against. Shackelton is portrayed as the excellent leader that he was, but is not presented as an infallible genius. He was a man who demonstrated amazing qualities in difficult circumstances, and he was a man who understood the burden of his leadership and the importance for getting his men home safely. If you've never heard of Shackleton, you are in the same boat (pun intended), as my wife, who was completely new to Shackleton's story. She loved the film as well, and was fascinated by the story. So if you are well aware of the story, or totally new to it, I highly recommend this story of survival and endurance.

At any point in this expedition, many would have given up or run out of ideas, but Ernest Shackleton's attitude reminds one of the Apollo 13 support crews in that failure was not an option. Everything great about the human species is seen in the efforts to discover an escape route from the pack ice, to find food in an almost lunar landscape and to send at least a few sailors to an island near the shipping lanes hundreds of miles from camp, the last chance for anyone to discover that Endurance's crew was still alive. Shackleton's refusal to give up, as well as resourcefulness in making unwasteful decisions, was the main reason for the rescue of the entire crew. Other than sled dogs, the antarctic didn't claim a single life - from this crew, anyway.

An inspiring story of the will to survive which takes us back to the "Heroic Age" of exploration. Ernest Shackleton's expedition to the Antarctic set off in 1914 on the eve of World war 1. However, they became trapped in pack ice not far from their destination, though not close enough. So began a 2-year ordeal in the most inhospitable conditions,a constant fight for survival, before the redoubtable Shackleton got his men to safety...without losing one life. Then, on top of that, the men hurried back to help the war effort. The documentaries mix footage taken by the original expedition photographer and new footage to show the picturesque yet deadly, inhospitable and unforgiving land, and tell this superhuman tale of survival. Effectively shot and beautifully edited, and well narrated by Liam Neeson, you can almost feel the cold. At the end of it, no matter how much you already knew about the expedition, you still cannot believe this incredible story is real.