The best films about Antarctica
It’s a challenge that any traveller to Antarctica knows well: conveying how extraordinary the White Continent is in real life. No camera lens ever truly seems to do its beauty justice. But what if you could travel there with a proper film crew? Antarctica has attracted its fair share of film makers over the years, drawn by the challenges of filming documentary-style out on the ice, the desire to play with a snow machine in the studio, or just the love of animating a chorus line of dancing penguins.
With this in mind, we’ve curated a list of the best feature films and documentaries about Antarctica. So if you’re looking for some cinematic inspiration, wrap up warm, grab your bucket of popcorn and settle in for some great polar viewing.
Endurance
When it comes to a compelling Antarctic story, it’s hard to beat that of polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance – his ship that was crushed by the ice during his attempt to cross Antarctica, leaving him and his 27 men with no option but to pull off one of the greatest feats of survival and rescue in maritime history. What could be more inspiring than that?
Well, how about following it up with an almost as improbable quest to find Endurance’s wreck more than a century later, in one of the harshest environments on Earth? This gripping 2023 National Geographic feature documentary (directed by Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Natalie Hewitt) weaves the two stories together in a brilliant and beautiful narrative. For more on how the Endurance film was made and its namesake ship was found, read our interview with film maker Natalie Hewitt, who captured it all on film.
Encounters at the End of the World
In 2007, the veteran German film director Werner Herzog spent time at McMurdo Station – the American research base on the Ross Sea – as part of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, and produced the feature documentary Encounters at the End of the World as a result.
Werner’s traditional lugubrious style works well for him in Antarctica, where he is quite content to ignore the savage beauty of the landscape and concentrate on the fascinating lives of the scientists and maintenance workers living in the mini-USA of McMurdo. The end result is a revealing insight into a very human landscape – and very definitely not, as Herzog states in the opening sequence, ‘another film about penguins.’
March of the Penguins
March of the Penguins was the nature documentary that helped prove that wildlife films can be big at the box office. Its story is one of the most epic in nature: the life cycle of the emperor penguin. Male emperor penguins are some of the world’s most devoted parents, incubating the egg by their partner through the darkness of the Antarctic winter, when temperatures can drop below -60C (−80F).
French film-maker Luc Jacquet spent a year out on the ice shooting the film in the most brutal conditions. Morgan Freeman provides the narration, which is a touch more homely than a traditional David Attenborough-style nature film, but the end result is never less than beautiful to watch – or leave you in awe of what must be the toughest birds on the planet.
The Thing
We’ll confess right now, this 1982 sci-fi horror classic starring Kurt Russell tops our personal poll for the best film about Antarctica. It’s a creepy, claustrophobic story about a team at an Antarctic research base who are infected by a hungry shape-shifting alien. The Thing was released in the same year as E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, but is surely its complete polar opposite, if you’ll excuse the pun.
As the base members succumb to a mix of paranoia and amazing pre-digital body horror special effects, John Carpenter provides a cinematic masterclass in tension, right down to its famously unresolved ending. The Thing has become a genuine polar classic – many Antarctic bases even have special winter screenings, to liven up the long dark months for overwintering crews. Meanwhile, visitors to Antarctica today can be grateful that modern biosecurity measures to keep the environment safe don’t require the use of flamethrowers to vapourise malign pathogens.
Shackleton
Perhaps the most popular film shown on Antarctic expedition cruise ships is Shackleton, the two-part TV movie from 2002. With Shackleton’s slicked down and centre-parted hair, Kenneth Branagh is transformed into the eponymous hero.
The film, directed by Charles Sturridge, recounts the story of the Endurance expedition. THe cast and crew really suffered for their art, and it shows on screen: there’s no need for method acting when the film set is an open boat on an ice floe in Greenland.
The Endurance story is so improbable that it seems far-fetched, even for Hollywood, yet it’s all true. The roster of British character actors root the action well and Branagh has just the right blend of grit and inspiration to lead his men to safety.
Happy Feet
If you like penguins and have kids, can you truly be an Antarctic fan if you haven’t seen Happy Feet? This 2006 animated musical tells the story of Mumble, an emperor penguin chick who can’t sing to attract a mate, and can only dance instead. But boy can he dance. It’s a classic kid’s story about the quest to grow up and the penguin friends we make along the way, all carried all with bouncy tunes and a pleasingly environmental message.
There’s an all star voice cast, with Elijah Wood as Mumble, Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman as his parents, and a scene-stealing Robin Williams as Adelie penguin Ramón.
Happy Feet is great family entertainment, and is proof that some film makers should never be pigeonholed by genre: when he’s not directing cartoon penguins, director George Miller is best known for his Mad Max films.
Scott of the Antarctic
Scott of the Antarctic is the most famous film version of Captain Scott’s last expedition during which he and his four companions died on their return from the South Pole. It’s a terrific period piece, filmed in bright Technicolor in 1948, with plenty of stiff upper lips on display for an audience that had just come through the trauma of the Second World War.
Director Charles Frend brilliantly captured the polar spirit by sending a film unit to the Antarctic Peninsula, and cutting the footage in with location work done with the actors on a Norwegian glacier. Veteran character actor John Mills is superb as Scott, and Captain Oates walks to his doom in a moving piece of movie self-sacrifice. It’s all essentially true but seen through a very patriotic lens – needless to say that Scott’s polar rival Roald Amundsen never appears once on screen.
The Great White Silence
When Captain Scott headed south to conquer the Pole, he knew that it wasn’t enough to tell people you’d been to Antarctica – you had to show it as well, so he took along the celebrated photographer and film maker Herbert Ponting to capture the expedition. The Great White Silence (1924) is the result, and is considered the first complete Antarctic film.
Ponting left Antarctica before the death of Scott’s party, so there’s a great poignancy to his footage of them hauling their sledges south. But the film is so much more, with amazing footage of the ship Terra Nova crashing through the ice, and daily expedition life. Oh, and one more thing: Ponting very quickly worked out who the real cinematic stars of Antarctica are, so there are also plenty of delightful penguins among the Edwardian heroics.
South
Shackleton knew a thing or two about self-publicity when it came to promoting his expeditions, so he also took along a cameraman when he went south to Antarctica, the Australian Frank Hurley. He was able to capture some of the most dramatic moments of the Endurance expedition, and having carefully soldered it into the film canisters, Hurley’s footage was rescued along with the men..
South (1919) was never completed, as the camera didn’t survive to film the climax, but Shackleton used the footage while lecturing to audiences – a popular entertainment at the time. The restored and recut version was released in 2019 by the British Film Institute and is essential viewing for polar history nerds, adding a lush new score and plenty of DVD extras.
Antarctica: Ice and Sky
After the success of March of the Penguins, director Luc Jacquet returned to Antarctica to tell a human story rather than a wildlife one with his 2015 film Antarctica: Ice and Sky.
This story is a call to arms however, as he focuses on the life and work of the French glaciologist Claude Lorius, whose work on Antarctic ice cores since the 1960s provides crucial evidence in proving the link between greenhouse gases and climate change.
It’s powerful film making, patiently setting out its case for the effects that humanity has on the planet’s climate, mixing archive footage of earlier expeditions with footage filmed of Lorious on his return to Antarctica after his retirement.
Antarctica: A Year on Ice
In this 2013 film, Antarctica: A Year on Ice, New Zealand director Anthony Powell quickly comes to a similar conclusion to Werner Herzog, and decides that the most interesting human stories to come out of Antarctica today are those of the people living and working there.
Although the film tracks a full year in the life of the continent and its temporary residents, Powell took an astounding 15 years (and nine Antarctic winters) to shoot it, allowing him to stitch together a smart, nuanced take. Unlike Herzog however, he’s not immune to Antarctica’s boundless natural beauty, so the lives of the people he films are always in context with the immense scenery that surrounds them.
The Last Continent
Despite what dramatic conclusions you might draw from Shackleton, not all expeditions to Antarctica in small sailing ships need end in disaster, as The Last Continent demonstrates. Filmed by Jean Lemire in 2007 as a companion piece to his Arctic documentary feature The Great Adventure, it follows the scientific crew of the yacht Sedna on a 430-day voyage around Antarctica on a mission to record the effects of climate change on the continent’s wildlife.
The result is a film of great beauty and power, with the emotional impact not just coming from the environmental message, but the intimate nature of shooting on a small vessel in extreme conditions, where the line between security and danger is often as fast moving as the shifting pack ice.
Amundsen
Long overlooked by film makers drawn to the triumph and tragedy of Captain Scott’s dramatic arc, the actual conqueror of the South Pole, Roald Amundsen, finally gets his big screen treatment in 2019’s Amundsen, directed by fellow Norwegian Espen Sandberg.
Rather than just zooming in on the most famous chapter in Amundsen’s life, the film tells his whole life story, throwing in the Northwest Passage and North Pole into the mix, to remind us that this man was the 20th Century’s consummate polar explorer. If that makes for a slightly overfilled sandwich at times, it’s nevertheless an impressive one – if only Amundsen himself hadn’t given the director such a difficult job by making it all look so easy.
After Antarctica
Travellers to Antarctica well know that it’s a place that leaves a big impression, and After Antarctica is all about what comes next. In this 2021 film, director Tasha Van Zandt follows explorer Will Steger and the story of his epic 1989 traverse of Antarctica by dogsled, with an expedition made to the Arctic in the present day.
The two adventures are neatly braided together and give a smart meditation on the passing of time, the changing of the environment and our own lives, and the need to always keep putting one footstep in front of you in the snow in the fight to preserve the important things in life.
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Want to keep exploring Antarctica in popular culture? Check out our blogs on the 50 best books about Antarctica and the best podcasts about Antarctica.
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