Review of Chasing Ice (2012) by Tom N — 10 Nov 2012

The film has drama and beauty. The drama: a photographer driven to capture the visual images he has in his head--images that might save the planet--but which require years of work under the harsh conditions of arctic cold and danger, against impossible odds.

He and the small dedicated team risk death and failure at every turn yet succeed in bringing home mind-blowing scenes of extraordinary power. Some of the best scenes come from that obsessive stubborn quality common to the greatest nature photographers, being there, waiting for it, sticking it out until they get the shot.

These people are heroes in the climate war, overcoming the boundaries of normal human perception with automated time-lapse video to show us changes of a geological time scale that are happening in only decades.

The beauty is in the ice itself. Glacial ice and the arctic light offer unique visual mysteries that have fascinated painters since the first sailing expeditions. This film is in that tradition, serving up scenic wonders of astonishing scale.

The tragedy is that the ice is disappearing, flooding the oceans, threatening all of us. To understand that drama a certain amount of time has to be devoted to the science of climate change. The documentary strikes a delicate balance, keeping the story of the quest to get the imagery in the foreground and the lurking danger they hope to expose as the context for the story.