Movie · 2012 · Documentary · 1h 14m · PG-13 · English
Curator score: 7.4/10 (13.3K ratings)
Art meets science.
Overview
When National Geographic photographer James Balog asked, “How can one take a picture of climate change?” his attention was immediately drawn to ice. Soon he was asked to do a cover story on glaciers that became the most popular and well-read piece in the magazine during the last five years. But for Balog, that story marked the beginning of a much larger and longer-term project that would reach epic proportions.
Ratings
Curator score: 7.4/10
IMDb: 7.7/10
Letterboxd: 3.80/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 96%
Metacritic: 75
TMDB: 7.5/10
Director
Jeff Orlowski
Production
Diamond Docs, Exposure Labs, Doc Society
Cast
James Balog, Svavar Jonatansson, Adam LeWinter, Louie Psihoyos, Kitty Boone, Sylvia Earle, Dennis Dimick, Jason Box, Tad Pfeffer, Suzanne Balog, Jeff Orlowski
Curator Review
Verdict
A visually arresting climate documentary that turns glacial retreat into something immediate, cinematic, and hard to ignore. It’s strongest when it lets the images and time-lapse evidence speak for themselves, making the scale of environmental change feel both beautiful and devastating.
Best for
viewers who want science and activism presented through striking imagery
fans of observational documentaries with a clear real-world urgency
people interested in climate change, photography, or extreme natural landscapes
Skip if
you want a character-driven documentary with lots of personal complexity
you’re looking for a neutral, debate-style treatment of climate politics
you dislike advocacy documentaries or issue-first filmmaking
Overview
Chasing Ice is built around a simple but powerful idea: if climate change feels abstract, show it happening in plain sight. James Balog’s project gives the film a strong narrative spine, but the real force comes from the time-lapse footage, which makes retreating glaciers feel almost impossible to process. The film’s images are often breathtaking, and that beauty only sharpens the sense of loss.
Worth noting
It’s not a subtle documentary, and it doesn’t try to be. The argument is direct, urgent, and at times blunt, but the visual evidence is so persuasive that the film rarely needs to overstate its case. Even when the talking-head material is conventional, the central project has enough momentum to keep the film compelling.
Bottom line
What lingers most is the contrast between scale and fragility: massive landscapes changing faster than we expect, captured with patience and precision. It’s an effective piece of environmental filmmaking because it makes the crisis feel visible, measurable, and deeply human.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Two Cineasts (4★) · 51 likes
Film reviews in 22 sentences (or less)Today: Chasing Ice
„There is a glacier in Iceland, Solheimar, which has retreated a great deal, and every time I go back there and see what's not there any more, it does something to the heart. It makes you realise it's possible for a gigantic natural element to just disappear.“(James Balog)
Hi everybody, I saw this wonderful little documentary a few months ago. After being asked to take a picture of climate… more
Martyn Perry (4.5★) · 22 likes
Does global warming exist?
After watching this interesting, beautiful, disturbing documentary, you'll be left in no doubt.
The facts do the convincing, the images do all the talking. This is a documentary which covers an amazing endeavour from James Balog and really captures some astonishing footage the likes of which I've never seen before. But it's not just time lapse footage of chunks of ice and glaciers getting smaller, we're also provided some pretty convincing statistics about the number of… more
sofyan (4★) · 21 likes
Beautiful and terrifying
marlowe (4★) · 14 likes
the photos of his daughters on his computer i’m not okay :((
Mike D'Angelo (3.5★) · 14 likes
65/100
Damn this is scary. My distaste for advocacy docs is well-known (just this week I trashed a wildly acclaimed film about Uganda's anti-homosexuality bill), but this one works because its argument is fundamentally visual—reading about retreating glaciers just doesn't have remotely the same impact. Some of my pals here have complained that Balog is a dull subject, but the film is about him only in passing—even the bits devoted to his knee surgery (which only take up maybe two… more