Microcosmos (1996)
1996, Miramax. Directed by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou. Briefly narrated by Kristin Scott Thomas.
Decent Films Ratings
Overall
Recommendability |
?A |
Artistic/
Entertainment Value |
? |
Moral/Spiritual
Value (+4/-4) |
?
+0 |
Age
Appropriateness |
?Kids & Up |
External Ratings
Content advisory: Some documentary footage of invertebrate carnage and mating.
From a National Catholic Register review
By Steven D. Greydanus
To human sensibilities, insects are very far
from the most appealing forms of life on the planet — yet the
sheer fact that God has made so very many of them can hardly fail
to impress upon us that he must think more of them than we are
inclined to.
What Winged
Migration did for birds and Atlantis did for life under the
sea, Microcosmos does for the insect world. It’s an
astonishingly up-close and personal look at an infinitesimal
world as alien as anything captured by the Hubble telescope or
the Mars rovers — but also a world of strange fascination and
unexpected beauty.
These three documentaries bring us closer to their subjects
than any other nature film I’ve ever seen. For
Microcosmos, specially built cameras with powerful
magnifying lenses were built to capture insects as vividly and
powerfully as players in a football game or cars in a car
commercial. Stag beetles lock horns as fearsomely as rams,
raindrops land among insects like hailstones, snails mate with
almost human-like tenderness, and a pheasant picking off ants
looms like the T-rex in Jurassic Park.
My favorite discovery involved a sequence with an ant driving
off a ladybug and knocking it off a branch in order to defend its
aphids. I knew that ants farm aphids and drink a milky liquid
secreted by the mite-sized insects, and I knew that ladybugs eat
aphids, and for that reason are appreciated by gardeners, since
aphids eat leaves. But I had no idea that an ant, confronted with
a ladybug threatening its aphid farm, would fight and drive off
the intruder much like a farmer driving a wolf away from his
herd. It’s a startling sight.
Like Winged Migration and Atlantis,
Microcosmos is about showing, not telling; the images are
so arresting that no running commentary is needed, just as a
symphony needs no lyrics.
Related Content
You once talked on the radio about a bug/insect life movie that showed ants/spiders, etc. up really close … I have a nephew that loves insects. What was this movie’s title? Thanks.
Microcosmos. He’ll love it.
Link to this entry
A- |
***½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
Director Jacques Perrin and his crew of pilots and
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Shooting from hot-air balloons and ultralight aircraft, the
filmmakers insinuate the camera’s eye so intimately into the
midst of airborne flights of birds that one can almost count the
hairlike barbs on the feathers. Other times, one is staggered by
the sheer number of birds captured in a single shot,
sweeping across the sky like a curtain being drawn or covering an
island to the horizon and the edges of the screen.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
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score,
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Fantasia, a poetic marriage of image
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La Sonnambula, lacks the pedigree of Disney’s
masterpiece). Marred only by a brief opening voiceover, which
muses pretentiously about man’s evolutionary origins in the
ocean, Besson’s otherwise wordless film lets the beauty of the
undersea world speak for itself.
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B+ |
*** |
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B- |
**½ |
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Kids & Up
Arctic Tale is co-presented by National Geographic Films, which released
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An Inconvenient Truth, and when it grows up
Arctic Tale would like to be both of those films.
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A- |
***½ |
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Kids & Up
Welcome to
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A- |
***½ |
+1|
Kids & Up
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