'Endurance' Reviews: "The picture’s taut editing and deft storytelling make for an unexpectedly tense viewing experience"

          On November 1, 2024, 'Endurance' was released on Nat Geo, Hulu, and Disney+ to mixed reviews from critics. In the documentary, "In a legendary feat of leadership and perseverance, polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton kept alive his crew of 27 men for over a year despite the loss of their ship in frigid pack ice. Over a century later, a team of modern-day explorers sets out to find the sunken ship. Using unprecedented AI tools, the actual voices of Shackleton and his crew "read" their personal diaries from the 1914 expedition and, illustrated with Frank Hurley's original expedition footage and photos, create a shiver-inducing venture into the past using immersive techniques. Audiences are placed into you-are-there scenarios as Shackleton and six crew members speak their own diary entries, something never recorded when they were alive. In early 2022, the Endurance22 expedition team, onboard the South African icebreaker S.A. Agulhas II, carrying cutting-edge undersea search technology, set out to find the Endurance at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. Expedition Leader Dr. John Shears, expedition subsea manager Nico Vincent, director of exploration Mensun Bound and historian and broadcaster Dan Snow led a team of experts from around the globe in search of this perfect time capsule." Read the full review round-up below.

       Danielle Solzman of Solzy at the Movies says, "Directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, and Natalie Hewit split the action between present day and the original expedition. They utilize colorized archival footage, previous interviews, and recreations. In revisiting this era, they also turn to AI in bringing previous writing to life. This could prove to be a bit too controversial to some but for what it’s worth, the AI technology studied the person’s previous interviews in learning their voice and vocal patterns. The way I see it, it’s no different than how Lucasfilm has used technology in bringing a younger Luke Skywalker into Star Wars series such as The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, releasing to both excitement and controversy. But again, utilizing AI will always bring controversy with it. In this case, it appears to be the only way to give the crew its voice back." Adding, "As far as the present day goes, it is a thrilling race to see if they can find the ship. Assuming you’re already familiar, they discovered the ship on March 5, 2022. A number of attempts have been made in the years since 1998. It finally took Endurance22 and using submersible technology. I applaud everyone for deciding to scan the ship in 3D rather than make it a tourist destination."

Photo by Hybrid Storytellers on Unsplash

       Hugh Barnes of The Arts Desk notes, "Remarkable celluloid footage of the expedition, taken by the Australian photographer Frank Hurley, has been restored by the British Film Institute, colourised by the filmmakers, and then augmented by sometimes off-putting AI recreation of Hurley’s voice, along with Shackleton’s and Hussey’s, taken from actual recordings and passages in the adventurers’ journals. There are also dramatic reconstructions of various nail-biting moments that Hussey failed to document, some of them original, though some “courtesy of other storytellers”, as the film’s end title rather oddly notes. The film’s trick of intercutting between the stories of two different Antarctic expeditions occasionally pays off, revealing something deep and buried about the wreckage of human character – its tenacity, for example: John Shears, the 2022 expedition leader, confesses that his motivation in becoming one of the greatest British Antarctic explorers was the fact that his Devonian grandmother never got to see the world beyond Exeter. The final discovery of Shackleton’s three-masted ship lolling on the seabed, three thousand metres down, yields some compelling images and 3D laser scans, even if the moment of discovery itself – cue hi-vis hugging and backslapping and cries of “brilliant, absolutely brilliant!” among the boffins – can’t avoid a certain sinking feeling of bathos (appropriately the Greek word for “deep”)." Continuing, "Interestingly, even after Endurance, Shackleton had one more failure in him: he died of a heart attack in 1922 on the island of South Georgia after returning to the Antarctic for a last hurrah. Vasarhelyi, Chin and Hewit end their film with an uncanny coda, Shears addressing the Endurance22 crew by the remote graveside where Shackleton was buried on 5th March 1922, exactly 100 years to the day before his lost ship was found again. Shears’s voice breaks slightly, in a way that AI-generated ones never do, as he signals this achievement"

       Wendy Ide of Screen International praises the documentary, stating, "The picture’s taut editing and deft storytelling make for an unexpectedly tense viewing experience." Concluding, "Given the state-of-the-art equipment on board the Agulhas II, it’s hard to argue that the expedition members have as much at stake as Shackleton’s team did on their doughty-but-fragile wooden ship. But as the wreck proves elusive and the Endurance22 mission is extended, the risk of history repeating itself with an icebound ship is all too real, bringing a genuine tension to this fascinating blend of science and adventure."