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March of the Penguins
(Warner Independent: 2005)
Never in a million years would I have thought that I’d one day step into a movie theater to see a documentary.
Normally, I would have immediately written the film off as a waste of money, without giving the matter as much as a
second thought. Yet, I actually did pay the $9 ticket to attend a showing of March of the Penguins.
Yes, Virginia, Stephen Maiorana really is losing his mind.
Actually, March of the Penguins is one of the better documentaries that I’ve seen.
It’s a film that tells the true story of the annual journey of emperor penguins in Antarctica.
It’s a journey in which the many penguins leave their home to mate with other emperor penguins to start a family.
If you’ve never thought much of penguins before viewing this film, you’ll begin to respect them after seeing the
insane amount of torture that they put themselves through to keep their families alive. For instance, you’ll learn
that the male penguins live for over four months without eating, just to keep their babies alive as the mothers embark
on a seventy-mile journey back to their home to find food. Are you kidding? I can barely starve myself for four hours
without getting hungry, and if I had to walk for seventy straight miles like the mothers do, I think I’d be dead in a week.
These penguins are insane!
With information like this, the documentary is definitely very interesting and informative; however, it’s also a tad lengthy.
The film is basically a one hour, twenty minute narrative that could have been told in just twenty minutes.
A typical clip from the movie consists of a short narrative line by Morgan Freeman, followed by one or two minutes of
watching a group of cute penguins doing cute things as they waddle around on their cute little legs and slide along the
ground on their cute bellies. An entire twenty-minute set of "cute clips" could have been cut out of the film
without consequence.
In a way, I can understand the reasons that the documentary would be as long as it is. People don’t want to pay $9
per ticket to watch a half-hour Discovery Channel show. But on the other hand, I don’t pay $9 per ticket to look at my
watch halfway through a film. It’s not that the movie is a bore, because it certainly is interesting throughout
its entire eighty-minute length. But the documentary does tend to drag much more often than it should.
It keeps getting caught up on showing the audience more and more cute pictures of penguins when it should just be
stating its next point.
If you can just stand this extremely slow pace, there is a lot to be learned from the film.
If there’s one big thing that I learned from March of the Penguins, it’s that I most certainly wouldn’t want
to be a penguin. I admire the lengths that they’ll go to protect their families; but if I was one of those creatures,
I’d be packing my bags and moving to Bermuda right away!
Score:
(3 1/2 ice cubes out of 5)
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Release Date: 06/24/05
Profanity: None
