On the one hand, the film documents the hazardous daily lives of a group of men who gather valuable mammoth tusks in a remote archipelago, the New Siberian Islands.

The film takes us from the archaic landscape of the New Siberian Islands to a mammoth museum in Yakutsk, a meeting of young scientists in Boston, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, to a commercial cloning company in South Korea, and to gene data bank in Shenzhen, China.

"[5][6] Dr. Huanming Yang from the BGI Human Genome Center in Shenzhen[7] sums up the future-oriented research shown in the film as follows: "We proposed the first project to sequence everything in the world.

Ivory, or "white gold", can be sold in China for high prices[9] — and in order to reach this goal, the hunters are risking a great deal.

[11] In order to realize this ambition he travels to South Korea, together with his wife, Lena Grigorieva, to visit the biotech company named Sooam, led by Hwang Woo-suk.

In 2005, Hwang made headlines because his stem cell research was deemed as fraud; today he is the director of a successful commercial company that specializes in cloning dogs.

[16] In The Hollywood Reporter, Sheri Linden writes that the film is a real-life thriller structured like a double helix, simultaneously frightening and unforgettable:[10] “At the center of the heady mix is the woolly mammoth, a long-extinct species that key figures in the exquisitely crafted documentary are determined to revive.

Those figures speak, without irony or warning, of the power to design bodies and perfect God's work.”[10] She continues: “With elegance and poignancy, the score by Max Richter and Edward Artemyev sounds its own alarms, a stirring match for the striking camerawork by a number of cinematographers.