Overall Rating
  Awesome: 38.24%
Worth A Look: 35.29%
Average: 7.84%
Pretty Bad: 7.84%
Total Crap: 10.78%
9 reviews, 48 user ratings
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| March of the Penguins |
by Rob Gonsalves
"Anthropomorphic mush; naturally, it was a big hit."
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It's possible that the human race is the only species narcissistic enough to see itself in every other species. As a pet owner myself, I can relate, but what we read as our pets' love might, for all we know, just be self-preservational loyalty to the big animal that's feeding them.In the French documentary March of the Penguins, an international sleeper hit that took America by storm, the Emperor penguins of the Antarctic are imbued, as in a standard Disney nature film, with emotions we can't know for sure if they really have. The new English narration, prepared by Jordan Roberts and read with predictable gravitas by Morgan Freeman, keeps selling us on the penguins' similarity to us. It's a rather offensively human-centered approach to what should be a mystifying and beautiful experience.
To be fair, it could have been worse, and it reportedly was worse in director Luc Jacquet's original French version (La marche de l'empereur), which according to Variety used "actors Romane Bohringer and Charles Berling to voice penguins murmuring sweet nothings to each other." (Someone get me a barf bag.) Here, the only voice heard is Morgan Freeman, who once played God and now functions as a godlike presence, telling the story of the waddling critters with an air of detached sadness when required, sometimes a hint of amusement when the funny little guys flop down on their tummies. Either way, the effect is to cheapen the footage, which is striking enough on its own.
Much is made of the harshness of the penguins' quest, wherein they must walk 70 miles to a place where the ice is thick enough to support mating. Eggs are laid, and the mothers take off for food while the fathers stand around sheltering the eggs, and eventually the hungry chicks, for four months while the mothers gather fish. Then the fathers take off and the mothers take over the "parenting," and eventually the chicks are left all alone until they, too, are ready to make the journey back to where the penguins started from. The presumptuous narration never misses a chance to jerk tears: "This is the first time the father has broken his bond with the chick. It is not an easy thing to do." Really? How do we know? Did Jacquet interview the daddy penguins?
God only knows how Jacquet and his crew withstood the freezing environment and gained the penguins' trust enough to allow such intimate footage. I can applaud March of the Penguins as a technical feat; the photography by Laurent Chalet and Jérôme Maison captures the savage beauty of the Antarctic as well as the details of the penguins' fur, and Sabine Emiliani edits the footage with an organic sense of suspense and grandeur. On that level it's a step up from the stuff you might see on Animal Planet or a National Geographic special. But then here comes Freeman glossing over the deaths of tired penguins who can't endure the journey: they don't die, they "disappear" or "fade away." When a mother's chick freezes to death, "the pain of her loss is unimaginable." We're told that "love can find a way even here in the harshest place on Earth." It's certainly not anything so mundane as the biological imperative.
And what about leopard seals? Don't they have to eat and feed their young, too? Doesn't their "love" count? Here, they become bad guys slaughtering the mommy penguins before they can make it back to feed their chicks, and Freeman intones gravely, "They have taken two lives -- the mother, and the chick who will starve without her food." And, presumably, the poor sad-sack daddy penguin, too, waiting around for four months for his regurgitated fish meal. (Three! Three are the lives taken by the leopard seal evildoers...) Heck, what about the fish -- don't they have young to feed, enduring love in a harsh place, and so on? No, they apparently willingly swim into the mommy penguin's beak, because they know those cute little chicks are squealing for chow."March of the Penguins" is great footage in a shotgun wedding to a sappily anthropomorphized point of view. It'll play far better on DVD, where you can watch the making-of featurette, turn the sound down on the narration, and put on some Philip Glass or something.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11299&reviewer=416
originally posted: 12/25/06 05:17:36
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Sundance Film Festival. For more in the 2005 Sundance Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Seattle Film Festival For more in the 2005 Seattle Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Atlanta Film Festival For more in the 2005 Atlanta Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
24-Jun-2005 (G)
DVD: 29-Nov-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
13-Apr-2006
![[trailer]](/images/icon/trailericon.gif) Trailer
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