Films > Film Reviews

Ice and the Sky

06/02/16

A quiet and biographical approach to the issue of man-induced climate change, Ice and the Sky was released ahead of the UN Conferenance in Paris last November and closed Cannes film festival the same year. 

French glaciologist Claude Lorius has spent most of his life studying age-old ice in the wastelands of Antarctica and using archive footage and the directorial skills of March of the Penguins' Luc Jacquet he treats us to some of the highlights. At 23 he was part of a scientific expedition to Charcot base, a journey which fuel a lifetime of research; now at 83 he returns to the continent for the final time. Surviving for months at a time in a bunker at sub-zero conditions Lorius endures extreme weather to extract poles of ice, juggling a family life with a commitment to science. His discovery that CO2 bubbles and dirt were fossilised records of earth temperatures thousands of years ago was invaluable to how we now understand global warming.

In a period in which climate change is perhaps the most pressing and urgent matter at hand, it seems odd that this film is such a personal treatment. No doubt a lot of it is interesting, even to the eyes of a non-scientific audience, and the physical lengths the team took to obtain ice samples is extraordinary, but it is not the 'call-to-arms' documentary that this kind of topic demands. Lorius stands alone in the landscape like a pagan ice god surveying his kingdom; in one shot a penguin waddles over and dives into the water, in another he stands knee-deep in a tropical ocean - it's like one harmless old man vs a world of climate change deniers. One moment is chilling: his discovery that for every nuclear explosion on the planet a layer of radiation covers the entire planet, each coating evident in the sheets of ice.

And it does feel like a very gentle study. The beauty of the ice crystal provides a few nice-looking CG images as we're shown how they eventually turn into the compact floating glaciers we see in Attenborough’s Frozen Planet. Even as the film comes to a close and a montage of television interviews rolls on, both Lorius and the presenters appear untroubled by the issue at hand. 'Hard-hitting' is an overused phrase, but for a climate change documentary this is what it needs to be.