Endurance

What an amazing documentary film. It retells one of the most incredible survival stories of all time and contains breathtaking restored film footage of the Endurance expedition as well as brilliant footage of the wreck that I have not seen before. I was also amazed by how they used AI to recreate the voices of some crew members so they can read their own writing in their own voice. It‘s just incredible what technology can offer, if it‘s used in the right way.

Exciting to learn more about Shackleton and the Endurance - particularly to see the colourised footage from the time, which reminded me a little of The Great White Silence. Like The Great White Silence, Endurance has excellent penguin interludes.


Was interesting to see the work that went into finding Endurance, but I think I would have liked to see even more of the work of team trying to find her but I suppose there has to be choices made to balance the story between the OG expedition of Shackleton and the 2022 one to find Endurance in a more limited runtime.

Slight disappointment to learn in the credits that genAI was used to voice the diary entries of Shackleton and his crew - while it was great to see the TV footage of those crew members talking about their experience decades later, I don't think anything was added by their voices from various recordings being processed when a living actor could have been hired to voice them, likely to better effect and also with less environmental damage.

Otoh nice to spot Formula E's Saunders C-B in the credits as well - I was only vaguely aware that he'd been off to Antarctica when he wasn't doing the electric race cars stuff and I guess this is what he was up to while he was there.