Antarctica is a true story from a time when machines and technology were far less advanced and exploring Antarctica was far more difficult. It is a story about the first Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition (JARE) of 1957, consisting of 11 men and 17 dogs.

Eight Below is based on the Japanese film and takes place in 1993. The Madrid Protocol, written in 1991, banned dogs effective April 1994. In fact, the U.S. Antarctic Program has not had any working dogs since the IGY.

Following the success of March of the Penguins and now Eight Below, Antarctica is suddenly sizzling hot in the movie industry. So hot that prior to the release of Eight Below, VHS copies of Antarctica could be purchased on the Internet for less than $20, while several weeks later, copies were selling for $80.

The movies are similar in more ways than many movie reviewers would have you believe. Both films open with seemingly endless views of expansive frozen landscapes. The filmmakers did a great job, as these shots reveal the breathtaking beauty of Antarctica. However, parts of Eight Below were filmed on location in Canada, Greenland, and Norway. If the Japanese version was also filmed on location, I missed it when the credits rolled. However, the credits state that New Zealand’s Scott Base provided support for the filmmaking.
Although I enjoyed both movies, Antarctica is the better movie, despite a lot of melodrama. The soundtrack by Vangelis is probably better known than the movie itself.

The dogs in each film get the best of both worlds—they adapt to the wild, yet their domesticated side knows how to make use of an abandoned weather station as a source of tasty snacks: cans of Spam in Eight Below, and cached seal meat in Antarctica. The real point of the story is how primal these creatures remain. Even after they’ve been trained and domesticated, they are just one catastrophe, or plane ride, away from the call of the wild.

In Antarctica, one dog finds shelter in a whale carcass that had previously been used as a refuge by JARE personnel during a blizzard. In Eight Below, the dogs find a leopard seal living inside a dead killer whale. The leopard seal attacks the dogs, but it looks unrealistically large compared to the size of the dogs. My first thought was that the seal was computer generated. However, the credits at the end of the movie named the “leopard seal puppeteers.” A scene in the Japanese version also shows a fight between the dogs and a leopard seal. The seal looked real, but the credits in Antarctica claimed that no animals were harmed making of the film.

I have no idea if dogs can actually pluck birds from the sky, but in both movies they do. I don’t know what bird species was shown in Eight Below, but in Antarctica they’re skuas. In Eight Below, the dogs howl with delight at the sight of the aurora borealis, but in Antarctica, they don’t understand it, and at least one is terrified by the eerie lights.

There are people in both movies, too. In Eight Below, the dog handler takes a scientist on a dangerous hunt for a meteorite from the planet Mercury. Bad weather causes them to hurry back, and the entire outpost is evacuated in advance of a catastrophic storm. The hero, the scientist, the rock, and the dogs make it back to the main camp—barely. In Antarctica, a group of meteorologists are returning from a remote weather station to their main base. They get lost in a white-out coming back, so they let the dogs Taro and Jiro loose, hoping that the dogs will find their way back to the station and lead a search party to them. They do.

In both movies, the dogs are left behind when the people are forced to evacuate due to climatic conditions.

Both films alternate scenes between the dogs’ efforts to survive and the humans’ efforts to return to get them—or to make peace with their consciences. In Eight Below, subtitles periodically note how long the dogs have been left alone, but that doesn’t enhance the sense of suspense. In Antarctica, subtitles note the name or names, and ages, of the dogs as they perish.

The dog handler in Eight Below never stops thinking about the dogs, but there’s not much he can do. He visits the scientist whose research financed the meteorite-search dogsled expedition, he hangs out at his mobile home on a scenic Oregon coast, and he pursues a reawakening love affair with the pilot who ferried them to and from the station. In Antarctica, the dog handler also thinks constantly of the dogs, he visits the scientist who was the JARE team leader, and he decides to take the two puppies he was able to evacuate with him to the families that supplied the expedition’s dogs. As time passes, the dog handlers in both movies sink deeper and deeper into gloomy introspection.

Six of the main characters in Eight Below are Siberian huskies and two are Alaskan malamutes. Six of the eight dogs live through their ordeal. In Antarctica, with a total of 17 Sakhalin huskies, besides the two evacuated pups, just two dogs—Taro and Jiro—survive.

If you are looking for reality, you won’t find it in Eight Below. You may wonder, as winter sets in, When will it get dark? Why don’t the surviving dogs eat the two that died? Why didn’t the birds leave? Those are just a few of the many unanswered questions. Another mystery: Although it appeared that, because of the “strongest storm in 25 years,” no one wintered at the American or the Italian bases, yet the flag was still flying when the characters returned to the ice and flew to the Italian base to “borrow” a Snowcat.

I also wonder where Eight Below’s props came from. The Seabee coffee mug in the radio shack and the National Science Foundation patches on the red parkas appeared to have the word “Canada” on them, not the USA. The patch also appears to depict a landmass, but if it’s the Antarctic continent, the peninsula’s missing. Who was the technical advisor?

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