Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure: To the ends of the earth

It hits you in the solar plexus. First, a deafening scrunch, then the blinding flash of a photographer's flare. Suddenly Britain's biggest cinema screen is flooded with the image of Ernest Shackleton's doomed ship, Endurance, crippled and frozen, berthed on its bed of polar ice, dazzlingly lit up and filmed in 1915 by the expedition's Australian photographer, Frank Hurley.

It hits you in the solar plexus. First, a deafening scrunch, then the blinding flash of a photographer's flare. Suddenly Britain's biggest cinema screen is flooded with the image of Ernest Shackleton's doomed ship, Endurance, crippled and frozen, berthed on its bed of polar ice, dazzlingly lit up and filmed in 1915 by the expedition's Australian photographer, Frank Hurley.

Seconds later you are airborne, winging towards a Technicolor modern Antarctica. Its vastness assails you – a bird's-eye view, like some polar Out of Africa. The effect is as startling as it is exhilarating.

Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure, which has just opened at the British Film Institute's London Imax Cinema, is the first in a spate of new films about the polar explorer. Next January, Channel 4 plans to screen its two-part extravaganza Shackleton, starring Kenneth Branagh in the title role, Robert Hardy as Sir James Caird (after whom Shackleton's 23-foot escape vessel, the James Caird, was named), with Kevin McNally, Mark McGann, and Phoebe Nicolls as Emily Shackleton, the explorer's long-suffering wife. Charles Sturridge (of Longitude fame) will direct.

Two short movies about Shackleton are currently touring the United States, along with a larger-than-life Endurance exhibition. Meanwhile, Hollywood is agog to see when Wolfgang Petersen (who directed The Perfect Storm, Das Boot and In the Line of Fire) will size up the challenge of Endurance, his projected Radiant/Columbia/Sony Pictures feature film, scripted by, among others, Steve Zaillian (who was Steven Spielberg's scriptwriter on Schindler's List).

With Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure, the director George Butler and Imax have done the explorer proud. It is painstakingly accurate (one of the film's advisers was Shackleton's biographer Caroline Alexander), and what it lacks as scripted drama it makes up for in visual delights: Reed Smoot's photography, like Hurley's, is a feast.

Five thousand men volunteered for Shackleton's Endurance expedition. Butler's film gives a sense of what those who didn't make it missed. Some of its most effective moments come from the juxtaposition of Frank Hurley's black and white/sepia original (meticulously restored over four years at the BFI's JP Getty Conservation Centre, and now available on VHS) with new colour wide-angle shots, filmed on location off South Georgia and Elephant Island. Huge floes seem to explode around you as the Endurance scythes through the ice, only – in January 1915 – to become stuck fast. Nine months later, cruelly crushed, they abandoned ship. It was 27 October 1915. Endurance lasted four more weeks, then sank. Perhaps not for ever: plans are afoot to locate and recover her.

Shackleton was Anglo-Irish (cue Irish fiddle music: Sam Cardon's sentimental score feels more cliché-ridden than enlightening). But the constant hubbub of voices, barking of dogs and ice chunterings, abetted by Kevin Spacey's well-spoken narration (Michael Gambon speaks the words of Shackleton), constantly bring Hurley's professional footage alive. The mock-ups of their desultory bases at Ocean Camp (after a Hurley photo) and Patience Camp (from a Marston picture) are particularly effective. Unexpected faces keep peering out as if you'd bumped into them yesterday: "Chips" McNish, the carpenter who made the James Caird seaworthy and built (from the other two lifeboats) their stifling Elephant Island hut, nicknamed "the Ritz", and John Vincent – the expedition's two "bad" boys whom Shackleton took on the perilous crossing but denied a polar medal for their truculence; or "Perce" Blackborow, the young stowaway, who should never have been there, and whom Shackleton famously promised to eat first of all in an emergency.

Butler's film is never better than when the chips are down: the zany football games over, the frozen tents finally struck, three boats and 28 men, rowing for their lives for six days in the fraught, perilous escape to Elephant Island, splendidly reconstructed with the help of George Marston's paintings (Marston was one of the original crew).

This was the first crux; the other was the boat journey, when Shackleton and five others aboard the James Caird, after three weeks of impossible odds – a hurricane, a tidal wave, icing over and umpteen near-capsizes – finally made land on South Georgia. Sadly, apart from some strong under-deck footage, this rescue dash proves one of the film's weaker links: for the plucky James Caird's journey, best await the Channel 4 and Petersen efforts. The landing in Cave Cove seemed well enough suggested; the immediately preceding crisis was far too tame: a force-11 gale needs Perfect Storm-type effects.

There is disappointment, too, at the treacherous mountain crossing of South Georgia. Nova/WGBH, the film's makers, boldly secured three of the world's most brilliant climbers – the Briton Stephen Venables, the American Conrad Anker (who recovered George Mallory's body on Everest) and the German Reinhold Messner (the first to cross Antarctica on foot and first to conquer Everest solo and without oxygen) – but then restricted them to scarcely a minute of footage; much superb material (Butler shot 145 rolls of film) was edited out. Even that (and the story of T S Eliot's famous "fourth man") is tacked on to some plodding costume shots, like limp period drama. One feels that the cameras, like Shackleton, were in a tearing hurry to get back to civilisation.

But the big-screen (20m high and 26m wide) experience is stunning. Imax's 11,600-watt digital surround-sound system and looming visuals make you feel as if you are there, sharing in the crew's horrors, washed by icy spray and finally waving in open-mouthed disbelief as Shackleton returns, as though from the dead, aboard a Chilean vessel to rescue his 22 marooned men.

Shackleton mania (as The Wall Street Journal dubbed it) seems here to stay. So is the polar fad: there is even an Antarctic musical (staged in Australia) – not to mention the new play based on Scott's Northern party by the Canadian David Young, currently running at London's Savoy Theatre. A spanking new Shackleton Library is now a major resource at the Scott-Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. After years of rivalry (the two explorers famously fell out on Scott's 1901 expedition), the Scott and Shackleton camps seem, at last, to be harmonised.

I should declare an interest: my father, a boy at Dulwich when the James Caird was given to the school in 1924, wrote the story of the boat and founded the James Caird Society (the international Shackleton society, with 670 members). Thanks to him, and to Dulwich, I got to know Hurley's extraordinary photographs (now available on Shane Murphy's CD-rom Shackleton's Photographer), first heard the explorer's voice on tape, glimpsed the crew's letters and diaries (which are being edited and published), beheld Shackleton's sledge harness and Worsley's sextant and, above all, the boat. I count myself lucky.

'Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure', BFI London Imax Cinema, London SE1, to 30 Dec (020-7902 1234). The 'James Caird' can be viewed at Dulwich College (020-8693 3601)