In 1914, renowned explorer Ernest Shackleton set out to make history with a bold attempt to traverse Antarctica from coast to coast. His journey, however, quickly devolved into one of the most legendary survival stories ever told. Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, became icebound in the unrelenting Weddell Sea and eventually sank, leaving his crew stranded in one of the harshest environments on Earth. Over the next year, Shackleton’s leadership and the crew’s sheer willpower kept them alive; they faced punishing cold, subsisted on limited food sources like seal bones and seaweed, and truly relied on each other to stay alive. Despite the overwhelming odds, Shackleton managed to keep all 27 men under his command alive.
Over a century later, in 2022, another extraordinary journey happened in the same Sea that almost doomed Shackleton and his crew. The Endurance22 expedition set sail from Cape Town aboard the ice-breaking vessel S.A. Agulhas II, armed with state-of-the-art technology aimed at locating Shackleton’s lost shipwreck. Led by marine archaeologist Mensun Bound and polar geographer Dr. John Shears, the modern crew faced their own set of challenges. Though they had autonomous underwater vehicles and sonar scanners at their disposal, the Antarctic remains as unpredictable as ever. And so, despite comforts and modern advancements, there was a palpable tension on board, amplified by the personal stakes and passions of the crew.
Endurance, the new film directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, and Natalie Hewit, brings these two extraordinary stories together, juxtaposing human, well, endurance across time. Shifting between Shackleton’s harrowing saga of survival and the Endurance22 team’s meticulous scientific search, the film explores the evolution of exploration. Through restored footage taken by the original expedition’s photographer Frank Hurley, newly colorized, as well as modern-day underwater scans of the ocean floor, Endurance captures the adventure that binds these two journeys.
Thankfully, this two-pronged narrative approach is more than runtime filler, and it’s the comparison that brings to life the film’s essence. Endurance constantly toggles between footage of Shackleton’s perilous expedition (as well as some AI-created voiceover from the crew’s writings) and the contemporary search for the shipwreck, and this juxtaposition reveals stark contrasts. Shackleton’s team faced every conceivable threat: starvation, hypothermia, and the daily uncertainty of survival. The 2022 mission, though undeniably ambitious, is cushioned by advanced technology and detailed planning, making their endeavor feel comparatively controlled. So while this parallel storytelling that the three directors employ is clearly meant to heighten the drama, it sometimes ends up diluting the intensity and brutality of Shackleton’s ordeal. Watching modern scientists, warm and well-fed, scroll through grainy sonar scans on high-tech equipment can feel almost sterile next to the raw, desperate endurance of Shackleton’s men, and it imparts a lagging quality to the film’s tensile arc.
Much like Vasarhelyi and Chin’s other directorial feats, Endurance is visually sumptuous, but it manages to impress on different terms here than in their previous films. The restoration of original photos and video from Hurley’s originals is breathtaking, successfully planting viewers into the frozen landscapes of 1914. The AI voiceover that supports much of this archival material is sure to draw criticism, but it undeniably adds a haunting immediacy to the crew’s writings, bringing to life the thoughts and fears of the men locked in a specific, more perilous, place and time. Whether this choice enhances or detracts from the authenticity of Shackleton’s narrative will likely be a matter of personal preference, but it does give viewers a unique, almost immersive sense of historical events. The scenes of the modern film crew capturing the Endurance wreck, lying nearly perfectly preserved on the ocean floor, are likewise mesmerizing, and it’s a shame that this impressive image-making wasn’t more prominently prioritized in the film, as they deliver some of Endurance’s most compelling moments and striking visuals.
But despite notable aesthetic strengths, Endurance struggles to maintain a tonal balance. The high-stakes, life-and-death desperation of Shackleton’s crew is often undercut by the relatively low-risk procedural approach of the modern-day mission. Vasarhelyi, Chin, and Hewit’s attempt to build tension aboard the S.A. Agulhas II — through countdown clocks and suspenseful sequences of standby while waiting on sonar images — can feel overly manufactured and shoehorned when compared to the realer, rawer dangers faced by the Endurance crew. Still, if the film fails to fully capture the emotional depths and sustain the turbulent tenor of Shackleton’s trials or bring the same skin-prickling viscerality of Free Solo, Endurance remains a visually stunning and thematically rich entry in the field of documentary. It serves as a reminder that even with the passage of time and shift in human reality, the drive to push the limits of our capability — which increasingly seems to require endurance above all else — remains as powerful and essential as ever.
DIRECTOR: Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, & Natalie Hewit; DISTRIBUTOR: National Geographic Documentary Films; STREAMING: November 2; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 40 min.
Comments are closed.