Amundsen: The Greatest Expedition

Source: Amazon

Streaming on Amazon Prime, with subtitles

A film review by Dr. Lloyd Sederer

Antarctica is the world’s southernmost continent on our globe, and boasts being its windiest, coldest, and iciest of our continents. At 5.5 million square miles, ice covers 98 percent of its land. It notably hosts the South Pole. It is a forbidding and deadly place today, all the more so 100 years ago, making it an explorer’s dream, and a deadly one. 

Amundsen: The Greatest Expedition tells the story of the Norwegian explorer who was first to reach the South Pole, Roald Amundsen (1872-1928), who remains a legendary figure in polar exploration. His other fearsome adventures also included being the first to voyage by ship through the Northwest Passage and the first to cross the Artic by airplane. 

In this arresting film, we are told his story from childhood to death, a life of danger, courage, defeat, and determination. Amundsen was mesmerized by polar exploration when it was marked by enduring punishing adventures, if an explorer survived. 

The film takes us through and into Amundsen’s life of exploration and the family, societal, and financial support he needed to achieve the feats he did. His leadership called for courage matched with significant economic support from Norwegian royalty and wealthy sponsors, whose largesse was always in peril, readily lost by his unsuccessful adventures and riding high by his remarkable exploratory accomplishments and mastery of the best technology of his times, from dogsleds to aircraft.

His power of persuasion and leadership held strong, through both years of success and amidst economic and human losses. He was a private man, lost in his fantastic aspirations. Not one to appear to benefit from the love of family and friends, he was given to solitude. Except, however, for his reliance on his brother, who managed the fundraising for the adventures, though who grew more pessimistic and distant as failures accumulated. 

Amundsen was buoyed by his distant love for a prosperous married woman and by the power that leadership provides. Notably, as well, from his surprising contact with two Intuit girls, whom he took in and supported as they were educated and adapted to the world of British society.

His life, as we witness, was a checkerboard of relationships and explorations, black and white as those were.

Amundsen was a man portrayed as traveling to not only distant and unchartered lands and tumultuous relationships but also to a twilight zone of his own mind. He lived and died by the sword of his adventures. His body was never found after one of his aircraft trips across the tundra. Death became a kindness if we consider the pain he suffered when alive.

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Lloyd I Sederer MD is a psychiatrist, public health doctor, and non-fiction writer

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