This movie is an uncomfortable mix of satire of upper class life in Seattle and quite genuine distress as one of those women cracks up. Still, it does have Cate Blanchett and does have Antarctica. She plays the lead, who abandoned a career in architecture in LA to follow her husband to Microsoft in cold, wet Seattle, and to raise their adorable daughter. The daughter cajoles them all into going on a cruise to the Antarctic Peninsula, which is as close as tourists are allowed to get. The prospect of being trapped in a small cabin in heavy seas, and of being surrounded by strangers, pushes her mother over the edge. She starts misbehaving, then disappears when her husband tries to get her counseling.
Spoiler alert: Bernadette gets her mojo back when she finds that the South Pole Station is having a design competition for a new base. She smuggles herself down there and re-unites with her frantic family. Over the end credits you see what she actually designed – a new base consisting of a series of pods that can raise themselves on hydraulic legs to avoid getting buried in snow. That base is real!
Halley VI Research Station
Halley Station was built in 2012 on the Brunt Ice Shelf by the British, and is the sixth in the series. The big Union Jack was edited out of the movie! They discovered the ozone hole at an earlier version of the base in 1985, which led to the Montreal Treaty banning fluorocarbons. Because the Shelf is moving and cracking, they put this one on legs so that it could be hauled to new locations. That was actually done in 2017, but the crack was still deemed dangerous, and so it hasn’t been inhabited in the winter since then. It still gets used during the Antarctic summer, from November through February.
The actual Amundsen/Scott South Pole Station is much bigger. It was rebuilt in 2003, also with legs. They seem to be working fine, and there are no plans to upgrade it. Still, big points to the movie makers for finding a nice example of Bernadette’s talents!
Let's See This Work 