"Antarctic Edge: 70° South" (2015) Movie Critic Review

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Antarctic Edge: 70° South (2015) Movie Critic Review
Official Site:     http://www.firstrunfeatures.com/antarcticedge.html
Production:     Rutgers University
Genre:     Documentary
Country:     USA
Language:     English
Director:      Dena Seidel
Producer:        Dena Seidel, Karina Daves, Richard Ludescher

Antarctic Edge: 70° South (2015) Movie Review: In 2014, scientists declared West Antarctic ice sheet melt unstoppable, threatening the future of our planet. A group of world-class researchers is in a race to understand climate change in...

IMDB : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2780714
Reviews By Critics For  "Antarctic Edge: 70° South" (2015)

Daniel Eagan | Film Journal International

Those who already worry about climate change will find their fears reinforced. Climate deniers will most likely need stronger hectoring to be persuaded.

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Ben Kenigsberg | New York Times

"Antarctic Edge" illustrates its points effectively, providing vivid evidence of how shrinking ice at the South Pole affects climates across the globe.

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Sara Stewart | New York Post

Doesn't feel likely to hold the average film viewer's attention, and makes Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" seem like a summer action flick by comparison.

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Alan Scherstuhl | Village Voice

What they find is scarier than what their predecessors turned up in The Thing and The Thing From Another World, and they explain it with such clarity and force you might feel bad for wishing the movie would let you Zen out to the landscape more often.

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Wes Greene | Slant Magazine

It appears afraid of alienating viewers by overloading on scientific jargon, and in the process becomes too attracted to ultimately superfluous anecdotes from her subjects.

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Antarctic Edge: 70° South Movie Review By MDBReviews

A standout amongst the most upsetting late disclosures concerning environmental change was that, much to the apprehension of climatologists, the Antarctic ice sheet is softening at a significantly more disturbing rate than already suspected. Since the issue is by all methods relentless, Dena Seidel's Antarctic Edge: 70° South archives the researchers who scour the landmass in brutal conditions to attempt to handle the outcomes the softening will have over our whole planet. In spite of the fact that primarily revolved around oceanographer Oscar Schofield and his examination, the film likewise incorporates individual histories from different researchers and their team, including looks into their family life back home, how their ravenous hunger for science started, and the grouped, once in a while diverting exercises and customs they grasp so as to make their Antarctic stay energetic and tolerable, for example, one researcher wearing a tacky looking coconut bra while in charge of a control room. Despite the fact that Seidel's readiness to dive further into her subjects past their occupation is goal-oriented, this likewise gives the film a winding quality that pushes their aggregate research in the field so far to the sidelines as to turn into an idea in retrospect

To Seidel's credit, she never frames climate change as a political issue, and includes no footage of politicians or laypeople arguing over the reality of the problem from an outsider's perspective; rather, the film is told from the standpoint of the scientists working at and around Palmer Station in Antarctica, which becomes surprisingly refreshing once one realizes how free the film is from blustery rhetoric—aside from a darkly ominous prologue featuring news footage of recent catastrophic storms. As the prologue implies that the well-being of billions of people is partly in the hands of a few researchers, the film easily threatens to succumb to hero worship, though Seidel ultimately presents her subjects as modest eccentrics simply doing their job with workmanlike vigor. By way of their warts-and-all stories, these individuals closely connect with the audience, but what the work and findings in each of the scientists' respective fields means in the context of handling climate change seems secondary to how this work affects them on a personal level. Seidel appears afraid of alienating viewers by overloading on scientific jargon, and in the process becomes too attracted to ultimately superfluous anecdotes from her subjects. This unintentionally gives her film the feeling that it's not a first-person account of working to figure out the effects of climate change, but an ensemble character study filled with quirky individuals who happen to be stuck in a cataclysmic event.

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