Chasing Ice

I enjoyed seeing Chasing Ice on the opening night of Austin's SXSW Film Festival, but I was also a bit disappointed by it. The film only partly delivers on its great promise, because it can't quite figure out whether it's a national geographic-style nature documentary, a personal adventure story or an environmental advocacy film. In the end, it tries to do all of these things and doesn't quite do any of them as well as it could. Chasing Ice is at its best when it documents Extreme Ice Survey's (EIS) beautiful photography of the melting glaciers perhaps better than anyone has done before. While the photography delivers an emotional punch it can't really speak for itself. The scientific evidence requires a lot more explanation than they provide. The film starts out with clips of talking heads criticizing climate change, but they never fully answer the criticism and never fully defend the case that climate change is man-made, dangerous, and in need of an immediate global action to remedy. Nor do they provide any particular direction for what the viewer can do either personally or politically to address the problem.

Instead they spend way too much telling their own story. They delve into the technical difficulties of mounting cameras to photograph distant glaciers over a period of years, the complexities of hiking to these locations, the personal danger and discomfort they had to endure, and most peculiarly the physical problems that lead photographer James Balog experienced with his knee problems and surgeries. All these personal stories are interesting to a point, but distract from scientific case that they need to make. This should be a scientific and environmental story not a personal narrative. The powerful case that the beautiful photography makes is undermined, by poorly conceived film narrative. The average viewer needs a lot better understanding of what the melting of the glaciers means and what sort of affect this will have on their daily life in the near future. A better narrative device might have been to show the melting ice of the glaciers and then film the rising sea level in other parts of the world. Some reports have suggested that the Maldives Islands might soon be underwater. Showing where the water from the melting glaciers is ending up could have proved to be a much more powerful narrative device. I wish they had done a better job at telling an important scientific story with deep political and moral significance for the planet.

During the Q&A after the film, Balog argued that this isn't a political problem, that it is a universal problem. It may be a universal problem, but its solution requires collective political action that is based on science not emotion. They are naive if they are unwilling to engage the powerful political debate that is preventing progress on this issue.

Noted photog and National Geographic contributor James Balog leads us on a tour of the glacial north in this stirringly-framed argument against the sins of global warming. It's a three-pronged picture, stuffing a biography, research paper and technical adventure into one seventy-minute package, and often feels scattered as a result. The science makes for interesting brain food and Balog's personal journey is unique, if a bit overplayed, but the real show-stoppers are his long-form time lapses and breath-stealing snapshots of nature at its most profound. The centerpiece of this film, and of his argument, are a series of three-year-long panoramas in which we clearly watch several glaciers shrink and recede at an alarming rate; a convincing testament to both the presence and speed of the global melt. Though Chasing Ice can certainly be accused of getting caught up in its own self-importance (or lost in the data), those lingering tastes of proof are worth waiting for and the constant presence of Balog's powerful photo portfolio makes the ride there especially sweet.

National Geographic photographer James Balog wanted to test his skepticism about climate change. With his Extreme Ice Survey, he was able to photograph undeniable changes in some glaciers. In this documentary, Balog deploys a series of time-lapse cameras to capture a long term visual record of the world's changing glaciers. The lengths to which this is accomplished is mind boggling.

It's a compelling watch and an important work. But it's the shocking final result that will amaze you. The visual of these glaciers actually melting right before your eyes will shake you to your core as it did to me.

James Balog and Jeff Orlowski team up in what turned out to be a fantastic effort in documenting vast amounts of photographic evidence of the effects of recent global temperature increases on glaciers in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland.

The footage is magnificent and the film is scored very well. James Balog's personal challenges in undertaking the project are also documented, and present an interesting angle to this style of documentary.

By presenting the footage in as non-partisan manner as possible, Chasing Ice avoids tarnishing its message with politics.

Obviously it's preaching to the converted here in Berkeley, but this movie is to global-warming deniers what sunlight is to vampires. You can't sit there and see these glaciers melting before your eyes and not be shaken. I had no idea it was happening so fast.

Regarding movie production values, it's a DOCUMENTARY folks, and a pretty darn good one - no one in my group was bored at any time. Really good story about this guy's obsession to document it, and awesome (in its original sense) nature photography, with some cataclysmic moments. We could hear some booms and crashes from the big-budget extravaganza Cloud Atlas playing in the theater next door, but I think this movie was just as cool, and it's all real.

@ JustCuriosity: Yes, it is an emotional appeal, and that's the point. Most people who are in denial don't have a clue of the scale of the problem and don't care, or they care in a shallow way about "the environment", but that's seen as some abstract thing out there somewhere, not related to their daily lives.

@Tracy Allard: Yes, the science and models are solid; climate scientists have been saying that for years, and they've been trying to get across to the rest of the world how serious the problem is. Meanwhile, the right-wing idiocracy has been shouting them down for crying wolf and even accusing them of fraud. This footage is undeniable evidence of the reality of global warming, and it's vital that as many of the public see it as possible.

I'm trained as a scientist and I'm painfully aware that 90% of Americans could care less about models - any mention of math or anything they don't understand instantly causes their eyes to glaze over. In fact, a growing proportion of Americans think that science is just a bunch of hooey made up by eggheads to pull something over on the rest of society. As Balog notes, half of us still don't believe in evolution. Please read Charles Pierce's Idiot America for more on the scope and magnitude of that problem.

A whole generation of us has been raised to believe that any nonsense can be true if only it's repeated in the media loudly and often enough. The only way that people are going to update their perception of reality is if they are forcibly shaken awake by events such as a hurricane in Manhattan - or perhaps sitting comfortably in a theater watching a piece of a glacier the size of Manhattan suddenly fall off.