London film festival
Shackleton’s truly perilous 1915 ordeal – gussied up with colourised footage and AI voices – minimises the stakes of a 2022 hunt for its remains by Dan Snow and friends

Here is a frustrating film that tries to tell two stories at once, and succeeds with neither. It’s the story of explorer Ernest Shackleton’s epic Antarctic ordeal in 1915 and how he and his crew had somehow to journey to safety after their ship, the Endurance, sank. It’s also the story of how this ship was finally discovered by a hi-tech logistics team in 2022, 3,000 metres down at the bottom of the Weddell Sea near the Antarctic Peninsula. It juxtaposes Shackleton’s extraordinary battle to survive with the modern-day scientists’ struggle to locate the Endurance wreck, with tiggerish Dan Snow on board bouncing amiably about – and it is a pretty glib alignment.

Furthermore, the black-and-white footage taken at the time by Shackleton’s famous embedded cinematographer Frank Hurley has been colourised, and passages from the journals of Shackleton and others are read aloud by AI-generated voices, taken (evidently) from existing recordings by the actual adventurers themselves; this is a presumptuous and flashy way of gussying the whole drama up.