In 1912 Douglas Mawson set out to explore an area of Antarctica to the south of Australia that at that point had not been charted by anyone. The expedition broke up into five parties of three men, with Mawson's heading East. When they were at the far end of their trek, one of their number fell into a ravine and died taking his dog team, sledge and most of the supplies with him. Mawson and Mertz turned back immediately, knowing that they did not have long to cover hundreds of miles before the ship Aurora left without them. To revisit the ordeal, modern polar explorer Tim Jarvis sets out to repeat the journey with the same equipment.
I woke up today to find that my heating had not come on during the night and it was the freezing conditions in my house that made me decide to watch this film to remind myself that I've still got it good. The story of Mawson's exhibition is not that well known generally as, at the time, other events overtook it. Certainly I did not know the detail until I watched this but unfortunately I do not think that the film did the story justice. Recently I have seen several docu-dramas that recreate famous adventures, specifically Joe Simpson's The Beckoning Silence took a similar approach but did it much better. The reason for this is that this film doesn't totally manage to balance the telling of the original story with the recreation aspect. Obviously a lot of the things that Mawson went through cannot be recreated but in the early stages I did not think that the film did a good job of telling the story in its own right. I think one of the reasons for this is that the film originally puts a lot of focus on Jarvis and his recreation.
The film gets better as it goes on, mainly because it gradually does shift to focusing more on Mawson, using Jarvis as a backup as opposed to vice versa, which was the situation early on. The narration doesn't particularly help the film as it is often quite flat in both style and dialogue. Jarvis is more interesting though and when the film structure uses him well, he makes for an engaging presenter. The filming of the whole thing is impressive and it looks good throughout.
Overall then this is not one of the best of the genre as it didn't totally engage me in the story in the way that Touching the Void or Beckoning Silence both did recently. That said it is still interesting and it does get better in the telling as it goes on.
