WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Titreenp SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

SincereFinest disgusting, overrated, pointless

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

lor_ The Anthony Powell who made this documentary is not one of the famous artists by that name, not the great costume designer nor the author of the classic novels "Dance to the Music of Time". He's just another member of this generation's "me generation" followup, one of the millions of believers that the most trivial "human" story is intrinsically interesting. This pointless feature is not, it's just dull footage.As a kid living in Cleveland I enjoyed watching our local TV series Jim Doney's "Adventure Road", in which guests would narrate silent films they shot on world travels, just like the travelogue documentaries that still played as movies in film houses of the day. They provided an eye on the outside world, uneventful slices of life or distant places, pointless but handy time-killers.Powell tells us this took him 10 years to make and he fails to bring to the project an offbeat or even original point-of-view (what our greatest contemporary documentarist Werner Herzog always tries to do), just giving a banal slice of life of folks who choose to live out the long, dark winter of living on the Antarctic continent. No sense of adventure or even danger/dramatics intrudes on the calm, tedious progression of scenes. In common with fiction cinema there is a story credit, but no actual story.I have always felt that documentaries need to be taken off their pedestal and judged by the same (or at least roughly analogous) parameters as fiction features, since the illusion and pretense of objectivity is a myth. Whether fact or fiction the filmmaker puts his or her personal stamp on what the feature is trying to say, and most docs are scripted, either beforehand or in post-production. In the wake of the revolutionary Godfrey Reggio films like "Koyaanisqatsi", a philosophical bent has permeated many docs, but this one is frankly stupid - the final line during the film proper is by a young misogynist who compares the "square world" (that means us, in the audience) to cattle -not the Hitchcockian view of those necessary evils, his actors, but rather as the guy voices over "just moving from place to place". At this point, Powell ends the show not with a striking vista of the Antarctic continent's steely beauty, but rather another of many cornball time-lapse shots of a frenetic metropolis at night, the sort of image that typifies "Koyaanisqatsi". Yes, we poor humans are in a rut, scurrying around in a pointless existence. No more pointless than the self-shut-ins who revel in living out the endless night of Antarctic winter in lonely fashion, even complaining (as we see in the film underlined) when new folk arrive sporting dreaded sun tans yet, to invade their privacy and solitude.With such dull stuff to watch my mind wandered and I thought of a movie (fiction for now but someday documentary in nature) about life in an expatriate Earth colony on Mars or perhaps a moon of Jupiter, as presented by some earnest fellow like Powell. If it was a sci-fi entertainment there would be drama and an inevitable existential crisis threatening the colony with extinction, or even bug-eyed monsters attacking. But in "Antartica" nothing happens, and because it is cloaked in the form of a documentary it passes the low-low bar as quasi- entertainment or educational content. Even the most minimalist of fiction directors (think of Lonergan and the stupid "award-winning" Manchester by the Sea) would have trouble getting away with that.

A_Different_Drummer As it sits, right out of the box, this is a treat.Documentaries are best when they project the passion of their creator and here we have a gentleman with infinite experience of living on the continent, a gentleman who even took the time and trouble to make his own camera equipment (that would work in the cold) and set out to capture the "experience" for those will never get it first hand.Which is most of us.Making heavy use of voice over (as opposed to head and shoulders interviews) this is a fun ride.I can tell what would have made it perfect.Since this is fundamentally a story about cold (people yes,landscape yes, but cold mainly) I would have loved to see a digital readout over every shot showing current temperature.For example, when "summer" ends and the last plane is leaving, I saw people without outerware, dressed casual standing outside. I kept thinking, what was the temperature? In the next shot sequence a winter storm has set in which looks like it could freeze thoughts. What was the temperature then? Just a thought. Good movie. Recommended.

Siebert_Tenseven This is an absolutely incredible visual and auditory experience. The scenery is close to what one would have seen in the Lord of The Rings films, and the music seems like it's from Lord of The Rings as well. It's almost as though the globe shifted and New Zealand overlapped with Antarctica, complete with similar production companies.For some reason, the narrative is very difficult to follow. For about fifteen seconds someone is being interviewed, and then another person is being interviewed for about five seconds. Then there are some time lapse penguins and some time lapse views of mountains with heroic music. It's almost like watching a large number of commercials end to end.After a while the fascination wears off. In some ways I started to feel like I was trapped in a camera that refused to function correctly. I never really got a chance to find out about anyone or their experience in depth. There isn't really any sense of character development. Plenty of descriptions of things but not too much much reflection of how it feels.If you're looking for something to watch that is visually stunning, this is probably as good as it gets. If you're interested in finding out what it's like to spend a year in Antarctica there are some excellent written accounts from explorers in the past that describe a lot more of what it was really like, minus the comfort of email.

Fiona Gilston Unlike many documentaries of Antarctica that focus on the wildlife, this amazing movie gives an insight into the life of those hardy souls who spend 6-12 months in this harsh continent. With honesty and humour, Anthony Powell treats the viewer to an insiders guide to some of the characters that call Scott Base or McMurdo Base their home for a season or two. This is the closest that most of us will ever get to experience a year working at the bottom of the Earth, but boy does it make you dream of going there yourself one day. Add to that some stunning footage of the untouched vastness of the Antarctic landscape, the night sky through the long winter nights, the ethereal shimmer of the Aurora and time-lapse videography and you get, in my opinion, a perfect 92 minutes of escapism to a place that most of us will never set foot on, but all of us should appreciate.