A documentary by Luc Jacquet. Rating unavailable

Imagine living in a snowcat for 28 days, the cabin temperature hovering around –52° Celsius, rolling across the bleak, wind-torn plateau of Antarctica.

That’s how French explorer and scientist Claude Lorius travelled on his first polar expedition. The comforts that awaited him after such a long journey? An underground research hovel, accessed through a door he and his team had to dig several metres down through the snow to access. They would spend the next year in this “termite hole” before heading back.

It was 1956 and Lorius was just 23 years old, and luckily for us and director Luc Jacquet, much of the incredible journey was captured on film. As we’re told at the start of this lyrical new documentary, the trip would set the course of Lorius’s life’s work to track global warming, with many returns to the inhospitable but “intoxicating” continent.

The film manages to be both an urgent plea for our planet and a passionate ode to the last age of exploration. How much you enjoy it will have a lot to do with how much you liked the narrative embellishments of Jacquet’s 2005 feature March of the Penguins. The words here are philosophical and poetic; the scenes of the elder Lorius trudging through the ruined landscapes he predicted decades ago—burned-out forests, sinking islands, and, of course, melting glaciers—meld with artful shots of ice and closeup crystalline snowflakes.

About the only big misstep here is taking away Lorius’s voice. Near the beginning, over a scene of the now 83-year-old man standing against a snowdrift, the voice-over tells us, in English, “I am Claude Lorius.” Except that he isn’t: actor Michel Papineschi provides the first-person narration, and it’s jarring.

Still, the film’s main magic has nothing to do with its style, and everything to do with the way it reveals what it’s like for scientists literally risking their lives for their work at the end of the world. More than anything, it is an ode to human endurance—and the kind of tenacity and passion that we can only hope may save humankind.