There is nothing you will learn in this documentary that cannot be gleaned from museum exhibits or historical and scholarly articles about Ernest Shackleton, the man and his expeditions. So why does it exist? The answer lies with the person whose voice is the only one we hear in the entire 90 min runtime. There is an amazing story of grit and survival against all odds that would have been better retold in an action movie, but Tim Jarvis would not have been its central focus.
Shackleton: The Greatest Story of Survival comes across to me as little more than the vanity project of a man obsessed with reliving the life of an explorer who captured his imagination. The documentary plays out with Jarvis regaling the audience about his own excursions to emulate the arduous journey of Shackleton and his crew - here is me traipsing through Antarctica in the insufficient attire and equipment that Shackleton used in 1914, but let's ignore the modern gadgetry and film crew I have at my disposal to make sure the world gets to see me LARPing as Shackleton.
The most tone-deaf aspect of Jarvis' ego-massaging endeavour is the half-hearted call to environmentalism and combating climate change in the latter third of the documentary - here is where the glacier was almost 100 years ago, and this is how much it has receded. I wonder how much money he and his entire crew have spent in recreating Shackleton's adventures and funding this self-indulgent documentary that could have gone into actual efforts to protect the environment. No one else, historian or environmentalist, was invited to offer insights into Shackleton and his ordeal or discuss the environmental catastrophe facing Antarctica, because it's the Tim Jarvis show.
