Life in the Freezer

Life in the Freezer
by Alastair Fothergill

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DVD details

Actor: David Attenborough
Director: Alastair Fothergill
Brand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Subtitled)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 180 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-11-22
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: BBC Warner

DVD Reviews of Life in the Freezer

DVD Review: Awe inspiring!
Summary: 5 Stars

This film is awe inspiring. I can't even imagine what hardships had to be overcome to film the animals and their environment...this is nature in it's most extreme and most breathtaking! Just get this DVD...I'm really serious.

DVD Review: Life in extreme icescapes
Summary: 5 Stars

This is the 4th entry in the David Attenborough Life series following The Trials of Life. The groundbreaking first series Life on Earth was based on evolution and started with bacteria making its way up to modern humans over the course of 13 episodes. The Living Planet was 12 episodes long and dealt mainly with adaptation over a wide range of environments that also incorporated more Earth science along with the life science in terms of geology and environments. The Trials of Life was 12 episodes long and all about animal behaviour.

Following these 3 core life series it was time for Attenborough to start a specialisation series and instead of following the 12-13 episode discipline that started with Clark's Civilisations and Bronowski's The Ascent of Man and birthed other great series like Sagan's Cosmos, Attenborough goes for the shorter episode format (both in length and number) of his previous non-life series such as The Tribal Eye, The First Eden and Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives for 6 instalments on an expert theme, Attenborough would undertake the mission impossible of his life series, nature in the Antarctic where there is hardly any life at all, and when it does appear it is under the most excessive kind of conditions imaginable. So much was the task at hand that Attenborough ended up devoting a large segment of the last episode to the making of it. The 6 episodes are mainly about food in the Antarctic sea, breeding, migration due to the frozen sea, freezing and Captain's Scott journey.

While the first two in the life series are very similar The Trials of Life was a little different in that Attenborough had less screen time because animal behaviour needed to be captured discreetly. Life in the Freezer is a welcoming return to form and while Attenborough may appear mostly bracing harsh conditions he often engages wildlife and usually has to do so with a big stick for protection. The other thing is that there is really hardly any life at all there so instead we have to settle with mostly a series of different species of the same genus, there is only whales, seals, sea lions, penguins, some predator birds and the odd protoctist thrown in for good fun, the Antarctic is really mostly devoid of life which makes this series choice all the more remarkable. Still there are some of the most astonishing scenes here, millions, literally millions of penguins crowded virtually along the whole coastline, seals in underwater ice caverns filmed for the first time, penguins braving desert-like ice storms, sea lions fighting, penguins (did I mention them yet?) caring for their young, virtual to the point where the parent's near starvation, it is still utterly compelling viewing, especially the final episode where Attenborough walks us through the tremendous pressures and environments they had to endure to sometimes even get the most basic of shots captured on film, this might have the least amount of wildlife for the life series, but it is arguably his most hazardous and not something just any naturalist could undertake and yet Attenborough did it at 67 years of age!

DVD Review: Life In The Freezer
Summary: 4 Stars

Consistent with BBC's quality this is a fascinating study. The camera work is great though not as good as Planet Earth.

DVD Review: The Remarkable Penguin
Summary: 4 Stars

Life in the Freezer is the right title for this wonderfully filmed view of a remarkable creature. The viewer shivers as talented and dedicated photographers capture an amazing land of frozen waters and glaciers.

DVD Review: The definitive Antarctica doc
Summary: 5 Stars

This is the best doc on Antarctic wildlife ever done. Every mammal & bird are covered in detail along with their diets. The photography is excellent, though the detail is not up to Planet Earth standards (we've become a bit spoiled with HD)... but then this was filmed in the 90's. In its day it was totally state of the art, and remains so for content.

Description of Life in the Freezer

Antarctica is the wildest, coldest, most isolated continent on Earth. Encrusted in 90% of the world's ice, its 5.4 million square miles are doubled each winter by the freezing of the seas. The average temperature at the South Pole is -56, dropping to -90 and below in mid-winter. Yet this inhospitable landscape is home to a surprisingly rich variety of wildlife. Natural history guru David Attenborough and his camera team spent three years braving mountainous seas, blizzards with 100 mph winds, plummeting temperatures and glaciers the size of cathedrals to capture the majesty of Antarctica both on land and underwater. In this starkly beautiful landscape, they discover penguins by the millions, whales by the thousands, half the world's seal population and seabirds galore.

Life in the Freezer is a startling portrait of Antarctica as a dramatic, violent, yet ultimately poetic ecosystem. It's also a miraculously beautiful documentary that can stir an armchair adventurer, make one wish to be standing alongside host David Attenborough as he gazes at the dream-like enormity of glaciers ("glass-yeers," as Attenborough pronounces it) or visits one of the pristine, Georgian islands where seabirds flock during Antarctica's version of spring and summer. With its frozen mass subject to cyclical expansions and retractions, Antarctica's changes determine the feeding, mating, and habitat patterns of a wide variety of wildlife. Life in the Freezer's multi-episode format allows each of those changes to be explored in rich detail. Attenborough demonstrates why certain birds migrate to Antarctica at the same time that humpback and killer whales show up to feed on swarms of shrimp-like krill. In some of the most amazing footage in the series, bull elephant seals appear on Antarctica's shores to manage their harems, mate as often as possible, and brutally fight to keep competitors away. As for penguins: they march, they partner up, they stand still in sub-zero snowstorms. But they also end up as seal prey (a darkly comic sight) and vault through sea waves like mythic heroes. This 1993 series is something special, easily surpassing March of the Penguins as a vision of life in the harshest environment on Earth. --Tom Keogh

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