disdressed12 i didn't know a whole lot about Ernest Shackleton,so this film was an eye opener for me.the title says it all,of course.it's a wonderful documentary very in depth and concise.Liam Neeson is the perfect voice of the narrator.there are also some reenacted moments which are also well done.plus, a good deal of the film taken by the camera man on the crew of The endurance survives,and so we see some of the events as they actually took place.one thing that struck me:back in 1914,people were made of sturdier stuff.as a society we have gotten so soft,that there are very few people today that would attempt what Shackleton did.for me,The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition is a 10/10

Danusha_Goska Save Send Delete "The Endurance" is one of the most amazing, unforgettable movies I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot of movies.) I wish I could require everyone to see it. "The Endurance" makes a mockery of most of what passes for action-adventure. It leaves comic book movies like 2008's "The Dark Knight," in its dust."The Endurance" tells the story of Ernest Shackleton's alternately miraculous and disastrous Antarctic expedition of 1914. For the bulk of the film's runtime, I was on the edge of my seat, gasping, overwhelmed by the horror and magnitude of the nightmarish conditions Shackleton and his men confronted. The men, stuck in Antarctica, watch their ship, their sole sure escape, crushed into a pile of toothpicks by heaving chunks of ice. A man wakes in the middle of the night to realize that the ice under his tent has shifted; he plunges, in his sleeping bag, into Antarctic Ocean. Sled dogs go from being trusted allies and team members to something starving men debate eating. These conditions didn't last for an hour or a day or a month, but for over a year.Bad luck is followed by almost miraculous momentary deliverance. At one desperate point, the fate of his men hanging on his ability to carry out an almost impossible task – walking non-stop for 36 hours across unmapped cliffs, mountains, and glaciers, after months of malnutrition and under-using the muscles in his legs – Shackleton is convinced that a supernatural companion accompanies him. Mary Crean O'Brien, daughter of Tom Crean, who also made this trek with Shackleton, insists that that ghostly companion had been sent by "the man upstairs." One may scoff, but in this trek, Shackleton just missed a blizzard that, had he had to walk through it, would have certainly killed him. But what about all the bad luck that damned Shackleton and his men to their icy prison? This is a film that has you asking the big questions. Why do men do these crazy things? What does suffering mean, especially given how hard some people seek it out? Are these men greater than the rest of us, or merely mad? Where are frontiers, and heroes like this today? "Endurance" gets you thinking about culture. The British Empire gets a bad rap, but it did train its men to be honorable, and to live up to a code of conduct. Shackleton and his men were stoic, self-sacrificing, and learned to transcend class and ethnic differences. I had to wonder how a group of youths trained by our current values of whining, victimization, selfishness, identity politics and deviance would have responded under a similar catastrophe.The film is beautiful to look at. The filmmakers traveled to the Antarctic and complement Frank Hurley's, antique, black-and-white film footage and still photographs with modern, color footage. The effect is mesmerizing. The modern film footage plunges you into the Antarctic; you will feel cold. You will contemplate turquoise shadows on pure white icebergs, ice-choked sea, and blizzards as aesthetic phenomena, as guardians of the last frontier, and as enemies who want to stop the blood in your veins and suck your body several fathoms down.I have to confess that I found this film hard to watch. And I couldn't stop watching it. After it was done, I really needed time to decompress. Moment after moment juggles human lives and fates. I'll never forget this film, though, and its demonstration of the power of the human spirit.

tom_75252 If you don't understand the intention of the expedition nor the purpose of this documentary, then you may like both.If you don't know what Shackleton's purpose is for the expedition, then you can use this documentary as a sedative to help you fall asleep. Only at the beginning does the narrator's comment stand out about the purpose: to go where many men have gone before, most needlessly.The vast majority of the narration fails to clue you in why these men are risking their lives to travel thru a big chunks of ice to get to other big chunks of ice. Are they suicidal? Are they dumb? No. But you wont find out from this documentary.This documentary should be free on your local PBS station. But if you have as much to lose as the unexplained reason this documentary gives for the expedition's men risking their life, then by all means, save your money.If you want a good documentary about traveling over ice for no real purpose other than glory, try "Touching a Void". Until then, find the better version of Shackelton's Endurance expedition for free.

Joe Stemme Let me say first, that I think the story of the Shakleton expedition is a fascinating one. One so strange, that it has to be fact to be believed (no fiction would pass this test). Still, I must say that ENDURANCE stretches the definition of a "movie" a bit much. Basically, it's a big-budget double episode of NOVA. The filmmaking is rather perfunctory. Adding to my disappointment was the fact that although they went to the enormous logistical and financial difficulty of shooting new FILM footage at the South Pole - they now show the alleged "movie" in theaters as a film-to-tape-and-back-to-film transfer! Huh? If you are going to charge people $9 to see this in a cinema, couldn't they have at least done a direct FILM transfer?