The film, loosely inspired by contemporary events and by Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires, follows the comic misadventures of an international group of explorers on an expedition to the North Pole, where they encounter a man-eating frost giant and a dangerous magnetic needle.

All are in disagreement until the congress's president, the engineer Maboul of France, explains his plans for an "Aero-Bus," an airplane with a passenger car and a huge figurehead in the shape of a bird head.

When they have been chased off, the Congress nominates an international group of experts to accompany Maboul to the Pole: Run-Ever of England, Bluff-"Allo"-Bill of America, Choukroutman of Germany, Cerveza of Spain, Tching-Tchun of China, and Ka-Ko-Ku of Japan.

The leader of the suffragettes moves on with her own plans to get to the Pole, building a machine fitted with propellers and a multitude of toy balloons, but it fails to get off the ground.

The completed Aero-Bus lifts off to great acclaim, though it meets with two difficulties; first the suffragette leader tries to board with the expedition at the last moment, and then the explorer Tching-Tchun, arriving late, is accidentally left behind.

Stuck by magnetic attraction to the needle, which breaks under their weight and plunges them into the icy waters, they signal for help and are picked up by a passing airship.

[10] The Conquest of the Pole is Méliès's longest cinematic work: 650 meters of film,[11] which, at his preferred projection speed of 12 to 14 frames per second,[12] is about 44 minutes.

)[16] Fernande Albany, who had previously appeared in Méliès's films The Impossible Voyage, An Adventurous Automobile Trip, and Tunnelling the English Channel, played the leader of the suffragettes.

The second one, Studio B, was built in 1905 with considerably larger dimensions, including a stage about thirty feet wide and an elevator crane allowing large objects to be carried up and down.

[19] Méliès created the film's special effects using a wide array of techniques, including stage machinery, pyrotechnics, scenery rolling horizontally and vertically, miniature models, real water, substitution splices, and superimpositions.

[22] In previous films, Méliès had sometimes used nonlinear editing for such moments, such as in A Trip to the Moon and The Impossible Voyage, in which the space capsule and dirigible, respectively, are shown landing twice.

[23] This scene in The Conquest of the Pole marks the first time Méliès fluently uses the mobile point of view, which had been pioneered by the "Brighton School" of filmmakers in England.

[24] The film was advertised as a voyage extraordinaire en 34 tableaux,[24] and announcements and reports about it frequently suggested a connection to Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires series; for example, Pathé's weekly bulletin promoted the film by saying that "There isn't one of [Méliès's] works that hasn't achieved the success, the vogue, and the popularity of a Jules Verne novel.

"[4] The British journal Bioscope described the film as an "extraordinary voyage," calling Méliès "the H. G. Wells of picturedom, the wizard who gives the fillip to our imagination, and provides us with scientific phenomena of his own making.

The film's failure is usually attributed to changing times; Méliès's theatrical, fantasy-based style, which had been innovative and influential early on in his career, had fallen out of popularity by 1912.