Despite harsh conditions, life in Alaska always finds a way to endure. Witness the spirit of the wild in the thundering stampede of the caribou, the beauty of the polar bear, the deadly hunt of the wolf pack. This film is about the majesty and uniqueness of wild Alaska, and about the resiliency of life itself.
Nominated for an Academy Award™ , Short Subject Documentary
* Blurb #1: Alaska is the best movie of the year. Yes, I know that it’s only March, and, furthermore, this movie was made in 1997, so technically it’s not really a 1999 movie at all. Doesn’t matter; Everest also came out last February, and remained my favorite of the year all along. Alaska is a worthy counterpart to that movie, both similar in its startling big-screen depiction of snowbound landscapes and vastly different in its approach and tone.
A panoramic view of the ice field, with the ice so tightly compressed that it refracts the sunlight in a narrow waveband formed a bright piercing blue. There are shots of icebergs forming, huge slabs of ice as big as ten story buildings, and crashing into the turbulent sea. There’s a shot of a migrating bird flock so dense that there seems to be hardly any air between them. And more -- the team behind Alaska certainly knows how to use the big screen.
It also knows how to make movies. Alaska is not harmed in any way by the apparent lack of plot and characters; and, of course, upon careful consideration, one realizes that both of these are present. The storyline is simply that of the annual circle -- from sunless winter through spring, summer, and fall, back to winter. The film is carefully edited so the passage of time is both clear and non-intrusive, with each sequence concentrating on either people, inanimate nature, or animals -- who, ultimately, take center stage as fully realized characters.
And what characters. Just by carefully observing animals, the filmmakers hit on a huge lode of fascinating behavior, from the touching motherly love of polar bear toward her cubs, to the pitiful-looking mangy fox trying to imitate the bears’ foraging method, to the insanely heroic salmon flock’s trip upstream for spawning. This also results in the thing which was absolutely the last pleasure I expected in an OmniMax movie, wherein we have --
* Blurb #2: Alaska is far and above the funniest movie of the year -- yes, yes, so far. Usually, watching a movie at the Museum of Science one would expect the usual things, like breathtaking images, which include de rigeur at least two shots made from helicopters flying over steep mountain ranges and at least one dizzying point-of-view shot. One wouldn’t expect any major hilarity.
I must admit that I spent most of Alaska trying -- and failing -- to heed the pre-show warning to be quiet, since the movie kept surprising me with priceless comic scenes, like that of a fearsome black bear giddily cavorting in the river, or the underwater antics of sea lions. I guess this is just another payoff of the boundless patience the filmmakers clearly have invested in this picture; when observing a lot of animal behavior, one is bound to see some funny bits. I’m very happy these bits were included -- they make Alaska much more than what one would expect from a simple nature documentary. It’s also the most fun I had at the movies for quite a while.
A small warning: I would think twice before taking any small kids to see this one, since there’s a couple of rather intense hunting scenes."
- Vladimir Zelevinsky
Leasing information
For more information on this film, please contact Charlotte Lazenberry at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
by phone at (713) 639-4725,
by fax at (713) 523-4125,
by email at clazenberry@hmns.org,
or by mail at:
HMNS Film Distribution,
One Hermann Circle Drive,
Houston, Texas, 77030.
# Of Leases: 122
Gross Box Office: $75,100,144
Formats Available: 15/70; 10/70; 8/70
Language Version Available: Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish (Catalan), Swedish
For more information on any of these films or to request a complimentary Viewing Copy (DVD format) and Press Kit please contact Charlotte Brohi, VP, IMAX Operations & Production at cbrohi@hmns.org or by phone at 713-639-4725
Film Facts
- Year of Release:
- Running Time:
- Co-Producer & Director:
- Co-Producer
- Writer:
- Narrator:
- Other Credits:
- Behind-the-Scenes:
- Film Highlight:
- 1997
- 39 minutes
- George Casey
- Paul Novros
- Mose Richards
- Charlton Heston
- Alaska: Spirit of the Wild is produced by Graphic Films Corporation for Alaska Film Partners, Ltd in collaboration with the Houston Museum of Natural Science.
- To capture all the footage needed to make Alaska, film crews from Graphic Films spent a total of 26 weeks on location in varied seasons of several Alaskan years.
- The opening sequence is a computer recreation of the world during the ice Age. The sequence. Derived from satellite imagery, had a database resolution of 1 pixel = 4km. The information was so detailed that it took 15 computers in Los Alamos, New Mexico, 42 hours to generate a single frame of information. The sequence took more than 12 months to complete.
"Alaska is ideal for a large-format movie: vaulting mountain peaks, 30-story blocks of bluish ice, three shades of shaggy bears and whales belly-flopping into the ocean. And the northern lights — the shimmering wisps — could carry an IMAX-scale film on their own.
So I wondered during "Alaska: Spirit of the Wild" why narrator Charlton Heston was given such a thick script. We don't need to be told that this last frontier is "a place shaped by ice and solitude." As we watch sea lions undulating through the waves, we don't need him intoning, "The sea lion moves underwater with the ease of a circus performer." The strength of large-format cinema is in its visual impact; it's distracting to have Mr. Moses describe everything we're seeing.
Of course I like some narration, such as the informative snippets about how native tribes call the shifting ice "white thunder" and the fact that Alaska has 5,000 glaciers and 3 million lakes. But really, less is more when it comes to words and music added to a large-format film. I want to listen to the wind and wildlife, not Heston's comments on them. Alaska's wilderness doesn't need a lot of orchestral enhancements, either. The deep-blue ocean, deep-green pines blanketing the mountainsides and the aurora borealis are abundantly spectacular on their own.
"Alaska: Spirit of the Wild" does, however, make for a pleasurable 39-minute trip away from the Utah desert. The seasonal changes in the sky, tundra and great bodies of water are enhanced by time-lapse photography; we're transported through winter's end and the short, intense summer, into the onset of another winter. The film puts us on river banks with brown bears, under water with minute salmon hatchlings and yards away from humpback whales breaching and lolling together.
We learn how polar bears keep warm: They carry a thick layer of fat while their fur conducts even tiny amounts of sunlight to their heat-absorbing black skin. Seems like that would have to be one bulky layer of insulation, but the polar bears move fairly gracefully. They're among the memorable characters in "Alaska," along with the black bear playing in the water and the elegant caribou raising their racks of antlers.
But apparently the filmmakers felt they had to set up conflicts — potentially violent ones — to keep our attention. Wolves are portrayed as evil villains disrupting the peaceable arctic kingdom. Perhaps the screenwriters thought a movie about the interdependent ecosystem that preserves the wilderness' balance wasn't riveting enough.
If the makers of "Alaska" wanted to highlight conflict and danger, they might have turned our attention to the threats of oil drilling in the state's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
"Alaska: Spirit of the Wild" ends with Heston booming, "It is a place little contaminated by the present, where we can rediscover a vitality and beauty vanishing from our lives . . . we all want to know such a place still exists." His failure to mention the possibility of oil development is the movie's principal shortcoming."
- Diane Urbani