The film stars Max von Sydow as S.A. Andrée, Sverre Anker Ousdal as Knut Frænkel and Göran Stangertz as Nils Strindberg.

In the wake of this failure, he faces criticism from both societal and scientific circles, openly expressed by expedition participant Nils Ekholm.

The balloon is inspected in Paris at the workshop of Henri Lachambre, while the third expedition member, Nils Strindberg, becomes engaged to his girlfriend, Anna Charlier.

The three men are compelled to undertake a grueling trek back over the ice with heavy sledges, which increasingly pushes them to their physical and mental limits.

The early drafts for a script were written in 1977, and the same year a team consisting of Jan Troell, the producer Bengt Forslund, the original writer of the novel Per Olof Sundman and a few other people went to Spitsbergen for location scouting.

The project was put on hold and Troell went to the United States to direct Hurricane, an assignment he was offered after the previous director Roman Polanski had suddenly left the country to avoid sentencing for unlawful sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old in Los Angeles.

It was praised for its attention to detail and how complete it felt in a review in Göteborgs-Posten by Monika Tunbäck-Hanson: "It is the overall approach and the firm hand that contemporary Swedish films so often lack.

Vincent Canby expressed in a review for The New York Times how he would like to know more about which parts of the story that were derived directly from Andrée's journal and which were speculation.