|
If you think you won’t like Winged Migration, then you probably
won’t. The movie is exactly what it looks like—an hour and
a half of flying birds. If that’s not your bag, I’m sure The
Hulk is playing on 79 screens within 10 minutes of your
house.
But for those who are fans of
director Jacques Perrin’s earlier insect documentary
Microcosmos, Winged Migration is still a mixed
bag. Perrin’s latest project is about birds. Specifically,
it concerns avian migration—the yearly process of moving to
more hospitable climes for the winter, only to return again
for the warmer months. Every year millions of birds routinely
fly thousands of miles, always returning to the same place
from which they came. The subject is certainly a fascinating
one, worthy of the talents of such an innovative nature documentarian
as Perrin.
And the filmmakers have risen
to the technical challenge of filming birds in flight. Five
teams spent three years following the winged creatures all
over the planet. Like in Microcosmos, the cinematography
here is as amazing as that which is being filmed. Camera operators
flew in helicopters, gliders, and balloons to get the right
shots, and developed any number of new technologies specifically
for the film, including a remote-controlled flying camera.
The results are breathtaking—the film beautifully highlights
the majesty of flight, the wonder of the landscape, and the
incredible precision of the birds themselves.
But natural beauty and technical
wizardry are not enough. Perrin clearly eschews the “Wild
Kingdom” approach to nature documentaries, where a narrator
accompanies the viewer and chimes in every few seconds to
tell us what’s happening. Instead, he wants the birds’ flight
to speak for itself. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. There are
too many important questions about migration that cannot be
answered by watching flying birds. “How the hell do they know
where they’re going?” “How many of them are there?” And the
one that chapped my ass through the whole movie: “How could
there possibly be more food in the Arctic Circle than wherever
it is these birds are coming from?” These are just a few of
the many fairly obvious questions that require the film somehow
to step away from the birds themselves from time to time.
Perrin appears to be aware of
these difficulties, as there is far more prompting of the
viewer than there was in Microcosmos. Winged Migration
features a New Age soundtrack that sets the mood—the birds
are in danger, the birds are being playful, the birds are
majestically soaring above the clouds, etc. Perrin himself
pops in with a voiceover every 15 minutes or so, and every
new species of bird is introduced with a subtitle stating
its name, how far it migrates, and where it lives. By and
large, though, very little happens. Even in documentaries—even
in nature documentaries—if nothing happens on-screen,
the viewer will have a difficult time identifying with and
maintaining an interest in the proceedings. Microcosmos
featured a plucky dung beetle manifesting his can-do spirit
in rolling a turd up a hill, two slugs making love, and a
host of other activities that make sense to humans. Though
Winged Migration includes a couple of deviations from
its central theme—birds stop every once in a while to lay
eggs, feed themselves, or fall to some predator or human hunter—by
and large, it is a showcase of flying birds. If it were half
as long, it would be an incredible IMAX movie. As a feature,
it’s beautiful to look at, but could be more interesting to
watch.
—Mike O’Connor
|
out of 5
While we would never encourage anyone to destroy a video... 
