WePerished

Spends just about all its efforts on the armchair 'experts' who aren't pilots, aviation experts or accident investigators and instead interviews every man and his dog who doesn't believe the official version. By all means, present alternate views and explore them but balance it. Instead it strives shamelessly towards sensationalist counter-theories by people who have questionable to non-existent understanding of aviation with added flawed logic. They do offer some expert views but it is so minor in screen time. Expert responses in episode 3 were limited to a couple of sentences. Whereas the kooks spend the majority of each episode discussing what they think happened supported with all the visuals the filmmakers can dream up. You'd never see this nonsense on an episode Air Crash Investigations.

Yes, it is an incredible mystery and so much of it doesn't make sense. It had never happened before. It follows that people will try and make sense of it, and sometimes as fallible humans we make a mess of trying to comprehend a mystery of this scale. But the documentarians should know better than to exploit this tragedy in the way they have. The film lacks any credibility and instead indulges too many illogical viewpoints for the sake of hype. It's pathetic, really. It's a prefect lesson on indulging the farcical.

For Franklin buffs there is a lot of interesting material here, although it is presented in an odd way. It's a documentary of a making of a dramatic retelling of John Rae's search for the lost expedition. Unique and kind of clever but isn't successful in its delivery.

While overall it is strangely presented, at times self-absorbed and seems to lose focus, it is worth watching for the scenes where the Inuit man visits England. In particular, there are some very heated and upsetting scenes where experts contest the fate of the expedition with the Inuit man. It's this climax that is worth watching this film for. And the discussion on Dickens was very interesting too.

It's a bit of a mess, poorly shot and gets itself distracted. But it is still an interesting mess, particularly if you have a curiosity for the subject matter.

As an aside, I'd love to know why they used so much of the rehearsal and script reading shots instead of the actual dramatisation they filmed. It was quirky but you wonder what the point of the dramatisation was when they used so little of it. Was this always the plan? Or did they realise the making of was more interesting than the dramatisation? Perhaps they couldn't decide, so they did both?