THINK of Eight Below as March of the Penguins with sled dogs. Well, sort of.

In 1958 a Japanese expedition in Antarctica had to be lifted out by helicopter, leaving their team of huskies marooned and seemingly doomed to perish. Months later when conditions improved the leader of the expedition returned in the hope of rescuing the dogs if by any chance they had managed to survive.

Their story was filmed in 1958 as a popular Japanese blockbuster, which Frank Marshall has now remade.

Although it wasn't possible to shoot in Antarctica . . . it's not a place you can set up a big Hollywood production for several months . . . Marshall has achieved a gripping sense of actuality by shooting in similar locations in British Columbia and Greenland. He sticks to the essential situation of animals stubbornly struggling to stay alive in the frozen wilds, and a man risking his life to try to get back to them. A compelling sense of the awesome physical reality of a 30 degrees below zero landscape and of the human and animal response to that becomes the movie, rather than a neat scenario. Paul Walker has enough of the innate persona of a stubborn loner to make his character's determination to mount a return expedition convincing. The dogs . . .

some seen in an earlier Disney movie Snow Dogs . . . are chosen for distinctive mannerisms that allow them to come across as characters without being sentimentalised. Bruce Greenwood plays the geologist whose near fatal accident on the original expedition put the dogs in peril, while Moon Bloodwood, as a bush pilot, provides a cursory love interest. Eight Below works because nothing is faked; this is nature in the raw, at once beautiful and destructive.