Thank you so much for that Mr Deckard! The documentary’s pretty much the book in extremely condensed form. Oddly, they miss out the attack on one of the boats by a killer whale.

There are no real heroes in this narrative, just a series of bad decisions and the mercilessness of nature, making it extremely difficult to ‘render’ into a Hollywood blockbuster, so I wondered who they’d got to adapt the book.

Bingo! We have three writers’ credits, Charles Leavit and Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, married couple and go to guys for any film involving animal (or alien, see James Cameron’s latest) intelligence (see Rise and Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes).

Their struggle would have been to pick or invent a character whose eye’s we see the story through. I’m going to guess they’ve gone with the cabin boy, who’s account, not discovered till many years later, seems to be the most accurate.

In the trailer, Chris Hemsworth (Owen Chase) seems to be being presented as the lead and therefore heroic, and indeed, he was the only one of the authority figures on the boats who didn’t order the murder of someone in cold blood in order to eat him, but he made many mistakes and was often unaccountably cruel. In later life he became mentally ill due to the trauma he’d suffered and was institutionalized.

My guess is that they’ve messed with the facts a great deal. There’s a vogue for extreme survival stories on film in the wake of the success of Gravity; Everest being one of them.