March of the Penguins
Directed by Luc Jacquet

Sometimes the thrill of a movie is just the determination that got it made. French director Luc Jacquet and his crew, working under National Geographic, spent a year shooting footage of penguins in Antarctica — the coldest darkest continent on Earth. The filmmakers’ adventure mirrors their subjects’. Embarking on a yearly mission the Emperor Penguins group together for a 70 mile trek to their mating grounds, What sort of debauchery takes place there isn’t detailed. Yet, as a result, loves are sparked and babies are hatched.

These birds lives aren’t made visually incredible, like in the superior Winged Migration. But there’s a foreign oddity to the white landscape and its wobbly-torso inhabitants. Jacquet defamiliarizes planet Earth. Focusing on the traits and emotions of animals untouched by civilization, March of the Penguins makes the natural world look like science fiction.

This is such a pure approach, it’s a pity the filmmakers don’t fully trust it. Morgan Freeman’s narration yammers on like one of those educational movies you’re forced to watch in school, when hands-off-observance is more powerful. The music is also overly pronounced and manipulative. As it weepily scores penguins losing their newborns to the cold, there’s a tasteless effect of human sentiment speaking for animals’ loss.

When it gets it right, March of the Penguins allows viewers the space to recognize alien customs as not too different from their own.