It’s a disturbing reality, an inconvenient truth, but the global warming documentary has practically become its own subgenre. Documentary film crews spread across planet earth to record, film and investigate every island, cave and cove of our blue planet. These documentaries are usually sincere in intention and noble in goal. They vary greatly in quality. The viewpoints range from shrill moral outrage to pensive simplicity, but what really distinguishes them is the drama, both natural and human, that is encountered, and the quality of the filmmaking and voiceover scripting. The Last Continent, a Canadian documentary about scientists researching Global Warming’s effects in Antarctica, is a decent, but not great, foray into the ice bound land.
Filmed in 2005, and released in 2007, The Last Continent had the misfortune of coming out the same year as Werner Herzog’s beautiful, Academy Award nominated documentary about Antarctica, Encounters At the End of the World. Neither as piercing a look into the human soul or the nature of the vast land, The Last Continent is just as beautifully filmed, although it lacks some of the poetic grace of Herzog and cinematographer Zeitlinger’s imagery. The density of layered blues and whites are gorgeous, and on Blu-ray pop with crisp saturation.
The film follows the crew of the Sedna IV, a research sailing vessel carrying scientists and film crew, as it spends nine months in the icy cold. They sail into Antarctica in January, the height of summer in the Southern Hemisphere, allowing them to get past the pack ice that otherwise would block the way. When winter comes, in theory, they will be frozen in place, and isolated for nine months almost without human contact. The film starts with crew mates and scientists struggling to decide whether to isolate themselves thusly. But once the final crew is onboard, and the last icebreaker and human contact they can expect for nine months has sailed out of sight, things go wrong almost from the start.
Their plan and ship is designed for this freezing in. But the winter is very slow in coming, and without the pack ice the ship remains afloat, and at risk. There is great intensity as the ice fails to appear, and the ship’s lines are strained by storms and icebergs. The very thing they’ve come to research, Global Warming, disastrously intercedes with their ability to get work done, right from the start. The pack ice fails to materialize for months, and the difficulties they face as a crew predominate the narrative.
The crew all speak French, and the film is subtitled, with narration by Donald Sutherland. The voiceover is basically boilerplate, standard lines about the drama and dangers they face. The music is also your standard boring documentary music: lonely pianos and swelling, soaring strings. We get some history, particularly about the Shackleton expedition, but this documentary is dissapointingly light on information. There is some information about the animal species who live among the ice, but not as much as you might want, and some information about the glacial make up of the continent, but it comes in late into the film. If a science documentary’s goal should be to inform, then The Last Continent falls short.
If the goal is to entertain, then the film does a little better. The visual beauty will certainly keep your eyes happy, and the moments of dramatic dangerous encounters with nature are satisfying. But we get altogether too many beautifully shot scenes of the crew’s activities, some emotional and full of struggle, some totally mundane. In short, there is too much introductory footage and not enough depth.
Still, there’s a tragic sort of blasé that comes over the modern documentary watcher. Beautiful HD footage of nature’s rarest landscapes appear in avertisements, television programs and movies, and, all too often, these scenes are being captured for the last time as Global Warming destroys habitats and systems both dramatically beautiful and ecologically vital.
It is beyond the scope of film to save the world, but it is up to each film watcher to not succumb to the numbness, apathy, and misunderstanding of overexposure and cliché. We must transcend the role of mere spectator and make the world a place worth seeing again with new eyes, worth filming, encountering, and living in.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
An hour of extra footage, broken into 11 “featurettes” some of them gorgeous and engaging, some of them tedious. Still, a good amount of extra footage. Also included is the trailer.
"The Last Continent" is on sale April 12, 2011 and is not rated. Documentary. Written and directed by Jean Lemire. Starring Donald Sutherland.
