Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are to produce “Race to the South Pole” for their Warner Bros.-based outfit Pearl Street. No one has yet been assigned to direct Peter Glanz’s screenplay, but according to the Hollywood Reporter, Ben’s brother Casey is attached to play the British Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott. The Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård will surely be in contention to play the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, with whom Scott conducted a polite rivalry.
Scott (1868-1912), who led Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922) and Edward Wilson on the ill-fated 1901-04 Discovery expedition to be the first humans to reach the geographic South Pole, attempted the feat again on the 1910-12 Terra Nova expedition. Spoiler alert: They arrived there on January 17, 1912, only to find that Amundsen (1872-1928) and his four colleagues and 16 dogs had reached the Pole (90° 0′ S) on December 14, 1911, 33 or 34 days earlier. "The worst has happened,” Scott recorded in his diary. "All the day dreams must go… Great God! This is an awful place.”
Scott, Wilson, and their three companions perished on Antarctica on their return journey. The bodies of Scott, Wilson, and Henry Bowers were discovered 11 miles shot of the next food depot by a search party on November 12, 1912. Scott's last diary entry was dated March 29, the probable date of his and his men’s deaths. His last written words were as follows:
“Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity but I do not think I can write more. R. Scott. For God's sake look after our people.”
Although CGI will enable the Pearl Street team to re-create authentically stirring images of the intrepid explorers and their dogs battling through blizzards, one hopes they will shoot some of the film on tundra locations. An inventive visual stylist such as Peter Weir or John Hillcoat is clearly required for the director’s chair.
In 2002, Kenneth Branagh excelled as the title character in Charles Sturridge’s well-received Channel 4 miniseries “Shackleton” (shown on A&E), which depicted his 1914-17 Antarctic expedition. It was filmed in Britain, Iceland, and Greenland.
The loss of Shackleton’s ship Endurance in November 1915 culminated in the heroic escape and survival of his entire crew in lifeboats. When they disembarked on Elephant Island, it was the first time they had set foot on solid land for 497 days.