March of the Penguins
Animal documentaries over the decades have vacillated between breathless paeans to the holiness of life on earth to rompish anthropomorphized cartoons of the wild. While March of the Penguins successfully drives home the incredible fight for survival that the Emperor penguins go through on the ice of Antarctica each season, my one complaint was a disturbing tendency toward the anthropomorphism of these birds. This review will be more emotional than critical, I should warn you.
Inevitable comparisons to Winged Migration will happen, so let me put my hat in. I felt, at all times during Migration, that I was watching animals, natural, instinct-driven beings. They were doing amazing things and I was never so aware of the expense and struggle for life out there in the world, but they were suited for doing these Herculean tasks, and therefore they were all Hercules. In March of the Penguins too, I am awash in amazement that these creatures have to do so much to achieve what we might consider so little (being alive), but at the same time, I was suspect of the emotions being ascribed to their subjects. It was evident that the parent birds are extremely invested in their progeny; it was evident that the babies were dependent beyond all reckoning on the care of the adults. Yet the movie pushed me toward the concepts of love and sacrifice and patience and all kinds of human emotions.
Perhaps these birds do feel these things; heaven knows under normal circumstances I am more prone to imagine an animal of any order having feelings like my own than not having feelings at all; but oddly I rely on sensitive treatments like this one to keep my sense of perspective. Of course all complex creatures feel pain and deprivation and as a result, fear and desperation, but it was a turnoff to me how much humanity the filmmakers were imposing on the behaviors. I could enjoy it if it were only what I imagine the birds were experiencing.
That aside, the footage is incredible; even the low-res digital imagery is stunning. The polar icescape is so frightening and unforgiving and desolate. The incongruous convection currents (the wiggly heat lines like you see over the freeway) only added to the sense of unsurvivability. These birds go months without food, huddle in the frozen dark and just work endlessly to stay alive. It shames me as a human whose survival even at the worst of times is never remotely as imperiled as that; I always have room to be a little lazy, to skip a dessert, what have you. They do it because they have no choice, and I am ornithopomorphizing myself watching them suffer - this isn’t suffering to them, something to endure until the heat comes back on in your apartment. This is just life. This is the cost of passing on one’s genes. Perhaps that is why I resist the suggestions of romantic love on the ice. I cling to the Darwinian selection process because if they did fall in love, they would go somewhere better to have their young, not risk their lives at every turn, somehow. I imagine I would fantasize about the luxuries of time that I have now as a human in a temperate climate.
The movie is not about me, but it made me respond. At first it was just a “wow neat” collection of pictures and some narration that tried to tie me into the story; by the end it’s something to think about, the nature of survival, the fragility of the earth and all its creatures. The compassionate among us would want to rush out and protect these noble, heroic (we impose those words) birds from our clumsy earth-ruination. March of the Penguins achieves the same awareness goal as Winged Migration, but it has to get under your skin to do it.
MPAA Rating G
Release date 6/24/05
Time in minutes 84
Director Luc Jacquet
Studio Warner Independent Pictures
