March of the Penguins - Dayton Daily News movie review

'March of the Penguins': Breathtaking documentary will give you chills

By TERRY MORRIS
Dayton Daily News

Many of us believe we would do whatever it takes for our children.

We don't know the half of it.

An amazing documentary about what the emperor penguins of Antarctica endure to have and raise offspring in one of the most life-threatening places on Earth provides humbling proof of that.

Warner Independent Pictures

'March of the Penguins'

The verdict: It's amusing. It's beautiful. It's awe-inspiring.

Director: Luc Jacquet
Narrator: Morgan Freeman
Run time: 84 minutes
Release date: June 24, 2005
Rating: G
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Try waddling on gnarled feet, with a few breaks for sliding on feathered bellies, over 70 miles of ragged, chunky ice several times a year. Try finding that one special mate at a noisy outdoor winter convention, producing one precious egg per year per couple, and passing it from mother to father without letting it touch the icy ground. Try being the father who goes without a meal for months while balancing the incubating egg atop his upturned toes under a flap of warming skin through howling winds, blizzards and ultra-extreme cold for months until the mother can return from her 70-mile round-trip to the nearest seafood.

There's much more. But the thing about March of the Penguins, which required 13 months of filming in a place where none of the footage could be inspected until it was all taken back to civilization for processing, is that it's never a chore to experience.

It's amusing, in a way that only creatures resembling a procession of miniature no-neck humans in tuxedoes can be.

It's beautiful. Black-and-white birds with splashes of butterscotch stand out in relief against the glistening white and bluish-white isolation. Two by two, they unite in textures, curves and tender caring that prove it's still possible to film a love scene that doesn't show everything.

It's awe-inspiring. We can feel their pain, their determination, their fear when a hungry giant petrel swoops in among the chicks, and their joy when reunited and then relieved of duty.

We could never survive what they've survived as a species over millions of years, so it's great that a few of us — French director Luc Jacquet with cinematographers Laurent Chalet and Jerome Maison — have made a dramatic and entertaining visual record of it.

The warmly expressive narration is by Morgan Freeman, who also did the voice-overs for War of the Worlds. The alien threat in that film might have been vanquished sooner if humans had called in the penguins. They are truly birds of steel.