Chasing Ice | Movie review

After Hurricane Sandy, a good chunk of the Northeast needs no convincing that sea levels are on the rise, but for skeptics—or even the insufficiently alarmed—the collapsing glaciers in Jeff Orlowski’s doc should do the trick. (They won’t, but they ought to.) The movie’s real-life hero is National Geographic’s James Balog, a landscape photographer whose time-lapse tableaux compress geologic changes for short attention spans. The results provide dramatic evidence of crumbling ice shelves and receding glaciers, including one that shrinks by the height of the Empire State Building in a span of years. Although Chasing Ice emphasizes the physical hardships and personal strain endemic to Balog’s métier, that’s nothing beside disappearing grandeur. He’s overshadowed by his own photographs.