Chas­ing Ice

What an odd doc­u­men­tary this is. Direc­tor Jeff Orlows­ki, with the assis­tance of pro­fes­sion­al ​‘ice chas­er’ James Balog, cap­tures footage of glac­i­ers the size of Man­hat­tan crum­bling to pieces in front of his cam­era. It’s a stun­ning nat­ur­al mar­vel, with sky-scraper-sized hunks of creamy blue ice sud­den­ly writ­ing on top the water beneath them.

The nat­ur­al response to these images is that we’re being allowed to wit­ness some sub­lime nat­ur­al bal­let which only a hand­ful of peo­ple on this rapid­ly dec­i­mat­ing plan­et can claim to have wit­nessed first hand.

What we real­ly should be think­ing is that this is actu­al­ly rather bad, and the inces­sant melt­ing of glac­i­ers in Green­land and the North and South Poles could be poten­tial­ly cat­a­clysmic news for mil­lions of peo­ple. But it’s hard to muster a feel­ing of awe and dis­gust simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, and so Chas­ing Ice’s mes­sage is some­what mud­died. Damn all this destruc­tion for look­ing so damn beautiful!

Balog is the brain­child of the Extreme Ice Sur­vey and, if this doc­u­men­tary is sup­posed to be believed, some kind of Earth­ly deity. He self­less­ly rejects his wife and chil­dren and the pleas of var­i­ous health offi­cials in order to do his bit to save the plan­et. He does this by post­ing cam­eras primed to take time-lapse images of the nat­ur­al land­scape which not only helps him to mea­sure the rate of melt­ing ice, but sad­dles him with much evoca­tive footage to fight his cause back on dry land.

Obvi­ous­ly it’s harsh to chide some­one so ded­i­cat­ed to such a noble and impor­tant cause, but Balog comes across as preachy, sanc­ti­mo­nious and hec­tor­ing in his attempts to deliv­er his mes­sage. There are even times – like a major hissy-fit in front of a defec­tive cam­era – you feel that he may pull a pros­thet­ic mask of to reveal a cack­ling Christo­pher Guest.

Per­haps the prob­lem is that we don’t need Balog here for this images to tell their sto­ry. The human sto­ry here is some­thing of a dead weight, espe­cial­ly when we’re being giv­en scenes of nat­ur­al dev­as­ta­tion that look like they’ve been beamed in from anoth­er galaxy.