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Dramas or Fictional Movies about Antarctica (non Documentaries)

ANTARCTICA (2008) (Israel)
Directed by Yair Hochner, featuring Tomer Ilan, Yiftach Mizrahi, Guy Zoaretz, Lucy Dubinchik and Liat Ekta.  A comedy about urban gay characters in Tel Aviv, with no apparent relation to Antarctica, other than one of the characters wanting to go there.  

8 BELOW (2006) (U.S.A.)
Directed by Frank Marshall, featuring Paul Walker, Bruce Greenwood and Moon Bloodgood.  This is an Americanized version of the film Antarctica, about the 1958 first Japanese Antarctic Expedition, which ended up stranding a pack of 17 sled dogs on the continent over a winter season and the efforts of the sled dog handler to return to pick them up.

HAPPY FEET (2006) (U.S.A.)
Directed by George Miller, with voices from a whole cast of famous actors such as Elijah Wood, Robin Williams, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman.  The animated film is about Mumbles, the Antarctic penguin who can’t sing but can tap dance up a storm.  It became a box office success and won the Oscar for best animated feature film of 2006.    

DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 (2005) (U.S.A.)
Directed by Matthew Barney, featuring Icelandic pop singer Björk, who also composed the soundtrack. This is a continuation of Barney’s art film series about self-restraint and creativity.  The activities take place on the Japanese Antarctic whaling vessel Nisshin Maru, which also serves as a film protagonist, as does a melted vaseline sculpture.  People turn into whales and the ship enters iceberg-filled Antarctic waters.

ANTARCTIC JOURNAL (2005) (South Korea)
Directed by Yim Pil-Sung.  An Antarctic mystery and psychological thriller about six expeditioners crossing the continent.  After they find a journal from another expedition that disappeared 80 years ago, turmoil and terror abound.  The movie is in Korean with English subtitles.
 
9 SONGS (2005) (U.K.)
Directed by Michael Winterbottom, featuring Kieran O’Brien and Margo Stilley.  The flashbacks of a young glaciologist in Antarctica about his steamy romance back in London, UK with an American exchange student, interspersed with live music performances that complement the film.  Controversial and notorious for the X-rated content in a supposedly mainstream film.   

AVP: ALIEN VS. PREDATOR (2004) (U.S.A.)
Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, featuring Lance Henriksen, Sanaa Lathan, Raoul Bova and Ewen Bremner.  Aliens fight it out with humans in a buried pyramid that is discovered by modern industrialists at an abandoned whaling station, deep in the ice of Antarctica’s Bouvetøya Island.  Novelization by Marc Cerasini.

RETROGADE (2004) (South Korea)
Directed by Christopher Kulikowski and featuring Dolph Lundgren.  The action is based on a ship trapped in Antarctic sea ice.  A team of genetically altered time travellers come back to the present to try to prevent a future biological disaster.  Two opposing time travellers fight it out amongst the ship’s crew of polar scientists and researchers, whose live are permanently altered.

ALIEN HUNTER (2003) (U.S.A./ Bulgaria)
Directed by Ron Krauss and featuring James Spader, Janine Eser, Leslie Stefanson, Carl Lewis and John Lynch.  This is about Antarctic researchers, signals from outer space and a mysterious object that is found buried in the ice at a research base.  If the object is opened and the creature inside awakes, it may lead to the annihilation of earth.    

DEEP FREEZE (aka ICE CRAWLERS) (2003) (U.S.A.)
Directed by John Carl Buechler, featuring Allen Lee Haff, Goetz Otto, David Milbern, Alexandra Kamp and Karen Nieci.  Scientists on an Antarctic ice shelf base with questionable activities are killed off one by one by a tentacled monster.

SHACKLETON (2002) (U.K.)
Directed by Charles Sturridge, featuring Kenneth Branagh, Phoebe Nicholls, Kevin McNally, Lorcan Cranich, Mark McGann and Matt Day.  This was a 2-part TV dramatization about Ernest Shackleton’s 1914-16 Endurance Expedition.  Based on a definitive biography of the same name by Roland Huntford.  The production received many award nominations but was criticized for being too long on Shackleton’s early life and too short on the final Elephant Island rescue story.

BOA (2001) (U.S.A.)
Directed by Phillip Roth, featuring Dean Cain, Elizabeth Lackey, Mark A. Sheppard, Grand L. Bush, Dean Biasucci and Craig Wasson.  At a new international high security prison for dangerous criminals, dug far inside Antarctic ice, a deadly reptile awakens from within.  All the inmates and the team sent in to investigate had better look out.

BLUE SUBMARINE NO. 6 (AONOROKUGO) (1998) (Japan)
Originally the name of a Japanese manga print comic book series, Blue Submarine No. 6 became a four part video animation TV program in 1998 and was reported to be in planning for a live-action movie.  Based in the near future when the oceans have flooded most of the earth’s coastlines, the series’ villain/ rogue scientist has a base of operations at the South Pole and is trying to induce a polar switch with the aid of the South Pole’s geothermal energy, in order to teach his brand of humanity to mankind.  War later ensues on Antarctica, with the good guys on Blue Submarine No. 6, part of a peacekeeping force, leading the way to confront the enemy.  Antarctica, meanwhile, has been transformed into the tropics.  The series finally ends with the pole shift stopped and an uneasy truce for the sake of humanity.   

SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK FOR MORE (1998) (U.K.)
Directed by Daniel Berk, featuring Faith Ford, based on characters created by Stephen King.  Two military investigators go to an Antarctic base engaged in illegal drilling, that has mysteriously lost all its crew, except for two survivors.  A world of devilish terror begins to emerge.   

ANTÁRTIDA (1995) (Spain/ U.S.A.)
Directed by Manuel Huerga, featuring Ariadna Gil, Carlos Fuentes, Francis Lorenzo and José Manuel Lorenzo.  A film not so much about Antarctica as a place but rather, as a state of mind and about music and drug addition.  The soundtrack consists of short, sparse, haunting, melodic themes, including the title theme Antarctica Starts Here, by John Cale.  

THE FORBIDDEN QUEST (1993) Netherlands
Directed by Peter Delpeut, featuring Joseph O’Conor and Roy Ward.  An old ship’s carpenter is interviewed in 1941 about his voyage as a member of an unknown Dutch Antarctic South Pole expedition in 1905.  He is the last survivor and has rolls of the expedition film in canisters.  His narration of the bizarre and frightening tale is interwoven with actual film sequences from vintage polar films shot by Herbert Ponting, Frank Hurley, Odd Dahl and others.  

THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH (1985) (U.K.)
Directed by Ferdinand Fairfax, featuring Martin Shaw, Susan Wooldridge, Sverre Anker Ousdal, Stephen Moore, Richard Morant, Sylvester McCoy, Pat Roach and a young Hugh Grant.  This was a 7-part TV dramatization of the competing Roald Amundsen Norwegian and Robert Scott British South Pole Expeditions of 1910-12.  Based on the book of the same name by Roland Huntford, who had a strong anti-Scott bias.

THE THING (1982) (U.S.A.)
Directed by John Carpenter, featuring Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, T. K. Carter and Richard Dysart.  Researchers at an American Antarctic base find remains of an alien buried at another Norwegian base, whose inhabitants have died.  A stray dog from the Norwegian base infects the Americans and one by one they begin to transform into the horrific Thing.  Music by the well-known film composer Ennio Morricone.  This film may be considered the classic Antarctic horror film. Novel by Alan Dean Foster, which was based on a short story by John W. Campbell.

THE INTRUDER WITHIN (1981) (U.S.A.)
Directed by Peter Carter, featuring Chad Everett, Joseph Bottoms and Jennifer Warren.  Team members on a drilling station offshore from Antarctica begin to die after they inadvertently bring up a prehistoric egg that hatches and turns into a monster.  The remaining three survivors must stop it.  Not Antarctic other than the location, which could have been anywhere.     

VIRUS (1980) (Japan)
Directed by Kinji Fukasaku, but featuring many American and international stars – Glenn Ford, George Kennedy, Edward James Olmos, Robert Vaughn, Chuck Connors, Bo Svenson and Olivia Hussey.  A plane crash releases a deadly virus that destroys mankind, with the exception of a group of scientists in Antarctica.  They must find a cure and save themselves from infection, as well as from a nuclear catastrophe.

ANTARCTICA (NANKYOKU MONOGATARI) (1983) (Japan)
Directed by Koreyoshi Kurahara.  This is the story of the 1958 first Japanese Antarctic Expedition, which ended up stranding a pack of 17 sled dogs on the continent over a winter season, and the story of two scientists and their attempts to return for a rescue next season.  Vangelis’ powerful instrumental title theme of the same name may well be far better known than the film itself.

CRY OF THE PENGUINS (aka MR. FORBUSH AND THE PENGUINS) (1971) (U.K.)
Directed by Alfred Viola, featuring John Hurt and Hayley Mills.  Based on the 1965 novel by Graham Billing.  A young ladies man and London-based biologist, goes to Antarctica to study penguins and to impress a fellow female biologist.  He starts to identify with the penguins, to think less about himself and goes into a life changing mode.  

THE NAVY VS. THE NIGHT MONSTERS (1966) (U.S.A.)
Directed by Michael Hoey, featuring Mamie Van Doren, Anthony Eisley.  A U.S. Navy airplane from Operation Deepfreeze, during the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year, brings back some tree and plant specimens from Antarctica to a south seas island navy base for a stopover.  The trees soon become killer monsters.  Based on the 1959 book The Monster From Earth’s End by Murray Leinster.     

QUICK BEFORE IT MELTS (1965) (U.S.A.)
Directed by Delbert Mann, featuring George Maharis, Robert Morse, Norman Fell, Michael Constatine.  A comedy based on the 1964 novel of the same name by Philip Benjamin, following his visit to Antarctica as a NY Times reporter during the International Geophysical Year.  Lonely Antarctic researchers, women on The Ice, a reporter, a photographer and a defecting Russian scientist are the ingredients for romance and intrigue.  

THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT (1977) (U.K.)
Directed by Kevin Connor, featuring Doug McClure, Patrick Wayne, and Sarah Douglas.  A sequel to The Land That Time Forgot.  An expedition sets out in 1919 to the south polar seas to rescue colleagues that were previously lost in a lost expedition in the land of dinosaurs.  They find a tropical oasis in the middle of the ice.  Based on the second story of the 1918 Caspak trilogy by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT (1975 (U.K.)
Directed by Kevin Connor, featuring Doug McClure, John McEnery and Susan Penhaligon.  A German U-boat sinks a British vessel during WWI, picks up the survivors and ends up in the south polar seas at the continent of Caprona, populated by terrifying dinosaurs and apemen.  Based on the first story of the 1918 Caspak trilogy by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE (1961) (U.S.A.)

THE LAND UNKNOWN (1957) (U.S.A.)
Directed by Virgil Vogel, featuring Jock Mahoney, Shawn Smith and William Reynolds.  A naval expedition’s helicopter, exploring the Antarctic coast, goes down in fog and emerges in a tropical valley.  The crew, including a female journalist find dinosaurs and carnivorous plants, not to mention a deranged sole survivor of a previous expedition.   

HELL BELOW ZERO (1953) (U.S.A.)
Directed by Mark Robson, featuring Alan Ladd, Stanley Baker and Joan Tetzl.  A former American naval officer joins and Antarctic vessel and meets a woman traveling to the Antarctic whaling fleet to investigate the death of her father.  The action and romance move to a whaling vessel, which is rammed and the protagonists fight it out with axes on an ice floe.  Based on the 1949 novel The White South by Hammond Innes.   

SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC (1948) (U.K.)
Directed by Charles Frend, featuring John Mills, Harold Warrender, Derek Bond, Reginald Beckwith and James Robertson Justice.  A classic dramatization of Robert Scott’s fateful 1910-12 South Pole Expedition, with an emphasis on the heroic aspects of the struggle.    The background music, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, one of Britain’s greatest 20th century composers, was later arranged into his Seventh Symphony, which premiered in 1953 and is still considered to be the mother of all recorded Antarctic music.  

LA FEMME DU BOUT DU MONDE (THE WOMAN FROM THE END OF THE WORLD) (1938) (France)  
Directed by Jean Epstein, featuring Jean Appert, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Paul Azaїs, Philippe Richard, Germaine Rouer, Charles Vanel.   A ship searching for uranium on a lost Antarctic island is bewitched by a mysterious woman living on the island with her child and insane husband.  20 minutes of the film has been lost and only a 64-minute version remains.  Based on the 1930 novel by Alain Serdac (real name Denise Fontaine).  
 
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