"Ice and the Sky" is a French environmental movie from this year and it was the closing film at Cannes 2015. Writer and director is Luc Jacquet, who is mostly known for the Academy Award winning, 10-year-old penguin documentary "La marche de l'empereur". And in his newest film here, there is also one scene with penguins, but it's really only very short. Most of the 90 minutes takes place at the Poles again, but this one is not about the animals living there. Instead we find out about French scientist Claude Lorius, who is in his 80s now and spent more than 10 years of scientific research at these coldest places of the planet.
Unfortunately, I cannot say I enjoyed this one. Sometimes it is too scientific, but really the biggest problem here was that it was simply not interesting. Maybe fellow scientists will appreciate this one, but honestly there was nothing memorable for me here in terms of his field studies. And the narration was pretty bad too. I am referring to the exact words here. The texts were so full of exaggerations that it felt very unauthentic and cringeworthy to me, like hundred times he thought about giving up being mentioned on several occasions and there was a lot more. Also mentioning the exact temperature 10 times does not help either. We know you are freezing. We don't need the numbers, especially if we see in the next scene a cook who wears thin clothes and smiles. That was odd.
In the end, and on 2 or 3 other occasions, especially early on, there are references to global warming, something that was not a factor at all throughout the entire movie. If they wanted to make a film on this issue, they should have taken a completely different approach. It felt thrown in very randomly and without connection to almost everything we saw and heard before. Regardless of what you think about the issue, this deserved smarter inclusions I must say. I am fairly disappointed by Jacquet with this one. Not recommended and I hope he can get back to his best with future projects again.
Unfortunately, I cannot say I enjoyed this one. Sometimes it is too scientific, but really the biggest problem here was that it was simply not interesting. Maybe fellow scientists will appreciate this one, but honestly there was nothing memorable for me here in terms of his field studies. And the narration was pretty bad too. I am referring to the exact words here. The texts were so full of exaggerations that it felt very unauthentic and cringeworthy to me, like hundred times he thought about giving up being mentioned on several occasions and there was a lot more. Also mentioning the exact temperature 10 times does not help either. We know you are freezing. We don't need the numbers, especially if we see in the next scene a cook who wears thin clothes and smiles. That was odd.
In the end, and on 2 or 3 other occasions, especially early on, there are references to global warming, something that was not a factor at all throughout the entire movie. If they wanted to make a film on this issue, they should have taken a completely different approach. It felt thrown in very randomly and without connection to almost everything we saw and heard before. Regardless of what you think about the issue, this deserved smarter inclusions I must say. I am fairly disappointed by Jacquet with this one. Not recommended and I hope he can get back to his best with future projects again.