Chasing Ice

Chasing Ice is as strong a documentary as I have ever seen concerning the issues of global warming, and that includes Al Gore's terrific Oscar winning Inconvenient Truth. It centers on a man named James Balog, a National Geographic photographer, who with a team sets an array of advanced cameras focusing on various glaciers in Greenland, Iceland and Alaska in order to see the change in the ice coverage over periods of months and years. At first the complex and fragile nature of such a program leads to great technical difficulties, but eventually they do get the program on track, and the results are no less than stunning.

The film is not overtly political. It begins with a montage of "skeptics" of human caused climate change. Balog, who claims to have himself once been a skeptic, ends up getting deeply involved in the project to the detriment of time with his family and the numerous surgeries he gets on his knees. Throughout the film the science of global warming and it's general effects on the planet is tiptoed into, but primarily it lets the visuals do the talking. This film is beautiful and disturbing literally at the same time with treks across ice sheets viewing the melting in real time, images of glaciers breaking off into the sea, and the main focus the time-lapse footage.

I'm not going to say exactly how these years-long images turned out, but just mention they are insightful, gorgeous, and certainly do not contradict the science which in at least general terms has been settled for many years. The highlight of the movie for me is not however seeing the glaciers shrink over a long period of time, but an instant of change after a couple of Balog's colleagues have sat on a vulnerable piece of ice for a few days; it's a spectacular break off of ice like you've never seen before—I was horrifically captivated.

Chasing Ice is fascinating on a personal and scientific level, and in my opinion has to be considered one of the most important documentaries of this decade. This film rightly doesn't try to find solutions to the problem as it's beyond its scope, but it clearly states that there is a problem; one we can't ignore.

Chasing Ice This documentary meets art feature and Sundance select for Excellence in Cinematography is visually breathtaking! This had been on my watch-list for months & thankfully the Environmental Protection Agency (Great organisation which deserves more recognition for their excellent reports, which were the backbone for my thesis on environmental issues last year!) Organised a special one-off free screening in the Irish Film Institute last night and the first of a partnership series hopefully. It was great to see a full-house with an applause at the end.

The documentary follows National Geographic photographer and Extreme Ice Survey founder James Balog and his passionate team across Greenland, Iceland, Alaska and the Arctic as they installs custom-made time-lapse cameras to document never before seen glaciation at an extreme. The resulting photography is both frightening and breathtakingly beautiful.

The issues that many people seem to have with this film are that it doesn't engage in a political argument and that it doesn't provide a solution to the problem. Balog stated that this isn't a political problem, it's a universal problem. The point is he's delivering a message with his photography and he's letting the photographs do the talking, not tarnishing the message with politics. & the aim of this film is to spread awareness not to provide a solution.

This is an eye-opener and a visual reference as to how much climate change is immediately effecting our plant. At one point we witness footage of the largest ever recorded glacier calving, an iceberg larger than the island of Manhattan calves from a glacier in about 75 minutes. Politicians and energy corporation executives should be made sit a mandatory viewing of this. Seize any opportunity you get to go see this on the big screen.

You can now apply to host a screening on the Chasing Ice website!

Noted photog and National Geographic contributor James Balog leads us on a tour of the glacial north in this stirringly-framed argument against the sins of global warming. It's a three-pronged picture, stuffing a biography, research paper and technical adventure into one seventy-minute package, and often feels scattered as a result. The science makes for interesting brain food and Balog's personal journey is unique, if a bit overplayed, but the real show-stoppers are his long-form time lapses and breath-stealing snapshots of nature at its most profound. The centerpiece of this film, and of his argument, are a series of three-year-long panoramas in which we clearly watch several glaciers shrink and recede at an alarming rate; a convincing testament to both the presence and speed of the global melt. Though Chasing Ice can certainly be accused of getting caught up in its own self-importance (or lost in the data), those lingering tastes of proof are worth waiting for and the constant presence of Balog's powerful photo portfolio makes the ride there especially sweet.

James Balog has one goal in mind throughout this entire documentary: to photographically demonstrate the rapid melting of our earth's glaciers. He doesn't throw statistics at us (okay, maybe one or two), and he doesn't bring politics into it, all he does is undeniably prove that the vast majority of the world's glaciers are disappearing right before our eyes.

What this documentary does is capture his journey to photograph these glaciers. It shows his struggles, his failures, and his successes. Yes, he may come off as a bit of a hero, but what he's doing truly is heroic and simply cannot be missed. The photography throughout this film is spectacular--absolutely gorgeous. In fact, he photographed an article on this topic for National Geographic, and if you've seen their photographs, you know the level of quality we're talking about here.

At the same time, however, there's kind of this sense of impending doom amidst all the beauty. It essentially shows all the damage humanity has done, in the past ten or so years alone, and I can only hope it's not too late to fix at least some of what we've caused. If this documentary can't get you to see the world and it's people differently, then I don't think much else can, his results are simply that stunning.

Obviously it's preaching to the converted here in Berkeley, but this movie is to global-warming deniers what sunlight is to vampires. You can't sit there and see these glaciers melting before your eyes and not be shaken. I had no idea it was happening so fast.

Regarding movie production values, it's a DOCUMENTARY folks, and a pretty darn good one - no one in my group was bored at any time. Really good story about this guy's obsession to document it, and awesome (in its original sense) nature photography, with some cataclysmic moments. We could hear some booms and crashes from the big-budget extravaganza Cloud Atlas playing in the theater next door, but I think this movie was just as cool, and it's all real.

@ JustCuriosity: Yes, it is an emotional appeal, and that's the point. Most people who are in denial don't have a clue of the scale of the problem and don't care, or they care in a shallow way about "the environment", but that's seen as some abstract thing out there somewhere, not related to their daily lives.

@Tracy Allard: Yes, the science and models are solid; climate scientists have been saying that for years, and they've been trying to get across to the rest of the world how serious the problem is. Meanwhile, the right-wing idiocracy has been shouting them down for crying wolf and even accusing them of fraud. This footage is undeniable evidence of the reality of global warming, and it's vital that as many of the public see it as possible.

I'm trained as a scientist and I'm painfully aware that 90% of Americans could care less about models - any mention of math or anything they don't understand instantly causes their eyes to glaze over. In fact, a growing proportion of Americans think that science is just a bunch of hooey made up by eggheads to pull something over on the rest of society. As Balog notes, half of us still don't believe in evolution. Please read Charles Pierce's Idiot America for more on the scope and magnitude of that problem.

A whole generation of us has been raised to believe that any nonsense can be true if only it's repeated in the media loudly and often enough. The only way that people are going to update their perception of reality is if they are forcibly shaken awake by events such as a hurricane in Manhattan - or perhaps sitting comfortably in a theater watching a piece of a glacier the size of Manhattan suddenly fall off.