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Drama explores complicated life of first man to reach the South Pole
When Roald Amundsen became the first human to reach the South Pole, the Norwegian explorer joked that never had anyone stood in a place so diametrically opposed to their stated goal. He'd been looking for the North Pole!
No, he wasn't antipodally lost. As Espen Sandberg's film explains, he was well into preparations to be the first to the North Pole when Frederick Cook claimed — falsely, as it turned out — to have beaten him to it.
So Amundsen set out for the other side of the world instead, telling king and countrymen the truth only when already on his way. The film shows him breaking the news to his team on a resupply stop in the North Atlantic. They all decide to go along.
This is the second epic Norwegian adventure from director Espen Sandberg. In 2012, he and co-director Joachim Rønning made Kon-Tiki, about Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 Pacific crossing on a balsa wood raft, done to prove that South Americans might have settled Polynesia in prehistoric times. Actor Pål Sverre Hagen, who starred as Heyerdahl, returns as Amundsen.
Sandberg clearly has a thing for films about explorers. In 2014 he directed two episodes of a series about 13th-century Venetian traveller Marco Polo, and in 2017 he made Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. (I'd like to think he was tricked into helming that sinking ship.)
He's got a lot to work with in Amundsen. The man not only beat Britain's Robert F. Scott to the South Pole by a month, he later became the first to overfly the North Pole, in an Italian airship, after several aborted attempts by airplane. And the film mentions only in passing that he was also the first through the Northwest Passage.
The story is framed, a little awkwardly it must be said, by a meeting between Bess Magids (Katherine Waterston) and Amundsen's brother Leon (Christian Rubeck) during one of the explorer's many absences. Bess is a married woman from Alaska — Amundsen seems to have fallen in love with other people's wives at least twice — and provides one of the film's few anachronisms when she claims to be “still on Canada time.” Jet lag, Ms. Magids? In 1923?
Leon uses the meeting to explain how his brother was entranced as a boy when their father brought home a globe with blank spots at either pole. And the film then lurches into a dramatization of that first fateful north-no-wait-south journey.
His native Norway hailed him as a hero, but the British cast him as the villain in their eulogy of Scott, who died on the return journey. Hagen does a good job playing Amundsen as a complicated man, not without compassion but often too busy for other people, or apt to ignore relationships once they ceased to interest him. We see him adopt two Indigenous girls from northern Russia on one trip, only to later send them back to Siberia. He used his autobiography to strike back at those he felt had wronged him, even recasting Leon as a mere “companion” in one early adventure together.
Amundsen the film is, like Kon-Tiki, a fun, educational adventure. I was struck while watching both films by the parallels between such late examples of “Heroic Age” explorations and the earliest days of space travel not long after. “We may as well be on a foreign planet,” Amundsen tells one of his men, surveying the frozen wasteland around them, and remarking on how they (and Scott's party) are the only people on a continent the size of North America.
Sandberg 's next film is Beast, starring Morena Baccarin as a woman who must survive after a plane crash on a seemingly deserted island. I look forward to that one and, recent films like First Man notwithstanding, I'd love to see what he could do with the story of Apollo.