Movies about heroic and sometime tragic expeditions, incorporating mountaineering and seagoing adventure stories, are an emergent trend in international mainstream cinema. American audiences will get their first taste of these films when the Weinstein Company releases the Norwegian Oscar nominee “Kon-Tiki” on April 19.
It’s ironic that Espen Sandberg and Joachim Rønning’s account of Thor Heyerdahl and his crew’s Pacific voyage in 1947 is the tip of this particular iceberg, since it unfolds in a tropical zone. Snowy wastes and frozen waters are the backdrops to most of them.
ARTINFO has reported on some of these films before. Currently, in development or production are the linked whaling epics “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex” and “Moby Dick," and the Scott-Amundsen saga “Race to the South Pole." There are also two pictures tentatively titled “Everest”: one about the pioneering British climber George Mallory, who died on the mountain in 1924, the other about the 1996 ascents of three separate crews that ended in the deaths of eight climbers. The latter is based on survivor Jon Krakauer’s book “Into Thin Air” and will reportedly star Christian Bale.
(A horror film that may partake of the kind of maritime thrills common to the whaling movies, “The Last Voyage of the Demeter,” is about the Russian ship that carried Count Dracula from Transylvania to England and ran aground in a tempest in Bram Stoker’s novel.)
Closer in spirit to “Kon-Tiki” is the Danish documentary “The Expedition to the End of the World,” which was co-produced with Swedish money. It follows the crew of a sailing ship as they endure the hardships of a voyage to the northeast of Greenland.
The movie “places the characters in a disconcerting situation as they cross the immensity of these virtually unknown territories,” Guilhem Caillard writes in Cineuropa. “Even so, the film is not intended to be too serious: [the director] Daniel Dencik shows the sense of humor of his heroes, whether they are artists, geologists, archaeologists or photographers. The film describes how they step back for a wider take, which translates for each one of them into a vast sense of self-derision.”
Caillard continues: “As the great sailboat makes its way through the ice, the filmmaker takes advantage of stopovers on the coasts and various events (melting glaciers falling into the seas, the sudden appearance of a polar bear) to gather everyone’s impressions. The artist admits that, when all’s said and done, we are nothing…”
The dwarfing of awe-struck humanity amid the Arctic wilds in “The Expedition to the End of the World” suggests the film engages with the Romantic-Gothic sensibility of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings “The Wreck of the Hope” (a.k.a. “The Polar Sea” or “The Sea of Ice”) and “The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.”
Hollywood’s current fairytale craze and the upcoming raft of biblical movies seem like desperate bids to harness and exploit the kinds of digital effects and imagery that made “The Lord of the Rings” films so popular. In contrast, the arrival of a series of films about adventurers taking on the elements may be prompted by a collective desire to restore to the cinema a kind of rugged integrity. Some of these films with undoubtedly use CGI, but hopefully the likes of Bale, Tom Hardy (who’s playing Mallory), and Casey Affleck (cast as Scott) will get to freeze their toes in real locations, too.