March of the Penguins 2005
I like PBS nature specials. I know that they unfortunately have to take some liberties with how things are presented. Hopefully there is nothing on the order of Disney chasing lemmings off a cliff and you hope they get the basics right. But in movies tailored for a wider, and one supposes less intelligent audience, my interest wanes and I become skeptical. March of the Penguins is like that. You see a penguin walking across the ice in one scene and it must be happy because the announcer (Morgan Freeman) says it is. In almost an identical shot with sad music playing we are told that a penguin on its own will die. In fact we are told over and over again that the penguins will die, or that if they don’t do x they will die, where x can be something like eating or picking lint out of its belly button. There is a big fascination with death throughout the movie, probably to give drama otherwise lacking when watching penguins standing around for 2 months straight with an egg on their feet. We are told over and over of the dangers and difficulty, and yet it is a part of penguin survival.
This isn’t to say this movie isn’t worthwhile and sometimes amazing. I had read an article about emperor penguins years before this movie was made and I remember being blown away by the whole thing. This is one of the wonders of the natural world. And penguins are incredibly cute and beautiful animals to watch. So I certainly enjoyed that aspect.
The fact is all wild animals are on the brink of survival at some point during a typical year. They are decimated by predators and rarely die of old age. But I don’t need that morbidity thrown in my face. The same people also made Winged Migration which presented even less information (I don’t think it was narrated at all; instead you would get some text on the screen every now and then) and also was fascinated by the deaths of birds, to the point that I walked out. This is a better movie than that was, but I still like my documentaries without a side of manipulation. While the penguins themselves certainly deserve an A, the movie itself only get a C+ from me.
Written: 08 Jun 2006
Owned on: Digital