The story of John Ray's search for the missing Franklin Expedition, which went in search of the Northwest Passage in the mid-1800s, is a fascinating one. Unfortunately this film, which attempts to mix layers of self-referential documentary about its own making with dramatized scenes among members of the British establishment at the time, is painfully misconceived at every level. Despite some spectacular images of the North, it's an amateurish bore. The climactic device of bringing in Charles Dickens' great-great-grandson to apologize in person to a representative of the Inuit people who were maligned by the great writer as murderous savages offers a ridiculous and irrelevant conclusion.
