An Icy Experience

You feel particularly bored on a Saturday night. You’re alone in the house. It’s raining outside. T.V. repulses you. In your half-awakened state of ennui, you casually happen to chance upon a 75 minute documentary on “the undeniable evidence of Global Warming”. Mundane, to say the least. The incessant bombardment of environmentalism has left you feeling nauseous. Nevertheless, you go ahead and press “play”.

The short opening sequence of “Chasing Ice” gives you precisely that: a confused overflow of information from pumped-up news anchors and screeching scientists, heated discussions, a debate that has made a fruitless journey of almost two centuries. Through the fast fades and intercuttings, you almost hear director Jeff Orlowski say, “This is not what this film is about.” Cut to black, and the actual movie starts.

We follow in the footsteps of James Balog, an acclaimed nature photographer, as he prepares to embark on his most ambitious project to date: capturing the very essence of climate change in a long sequence of images. He and his trusted team set up more than a dozen cameras across climate-change affected regions in the arctic, as reported by scientists. This is not a man who will make do with capricious statistics and flimsy computer models. Human see, human believe. Wasting no time in sermonizing, he directly puts us on the shores of Iceland, where you see the first human-induced “calvings” of the magnificent glaciers. From hereon, we are led on a journey of the arctic shelves. We see time lapse images of ice hopelessly melting, receding, collapsing with earth-shattering intensity. And yet, the overall film refrains from the usual didacticism ubiquitous in nature documentaries. Instead, it takes on the tone of a men-on-a-mission thrill ride, showing us real-life characters struggle, fail and struggle again with dogged perseverance. They scale fast-melting mountains of ice, rappel down bottomless crevices and take multiple knee surgeries in stride. They simply want the world to see. And boy, do they succeed. Some of the sequences filmed in Greenland had me emotionally confused - the images are both terrifying and ridiculously beautiful. As the ice sheets fell one by one, I wondered how many lives each little piece of ice would endanger in the not too distant future. Balog does provide some numbers, but we find them redundant; the visuals speak volumes, and the eerie background score fills in the harmonics.

The spirit of “Chasing Ice” is summed up perfectly by Balog himself as he prepares for a stunning nocturnal photo session: “[Night Photography] places your mind on the surface of a planet. You’re no longer a human being walking around in the regular world. You’re a human animal, striding along the surface of a planet that’s out in the middle of a galaxy.”

Yes, it’s all been drilled into our heads before, but never quite like this.