We finally made it to Winged Migration. First of all, this is a movie about birds without hardly any speaking made by French people. So, right off the bat, you have to understand that the whole movie just follows birds flying. Really, that's pretty much all you need to know as far as whether you might enjoy it or not. I mean, as a film following birds, it's a really well done movie. There is a voice over that comes in occaisionally with a French accent, and there are a few subtitles that say things like "The barnacle goose flies 2,400 miles from Mexico to the Artic circle".

That said, this is an amazing, powerful movie, much like Microcosmos, which was also made by the same team. Amazing in the sense that it takes you in to the hypnotic world of birds, and the photography is incredible, and you kind of get lost in their struggles. It was all filmed with a special kind of airplane that flew alongside the birds, an ultralight glider. Even if you hate birds, it's still pretty cool, just because every image is like a painting. There is a kind of Cirque du Soleil soundrack of crappy French music. And there are a few scenes of birds dying, which might upset a person who doesn't like watching a wounded bird get eaten alive by crabs.

Overall, I would have liked to see the making of more than the actual movie, because when they are filming birds and there is suddenly an avalanche, I couldn't help but wonder how the camera man survived. However, I think nature films can kind of put you in a reflective mood about life in general, not just for the welfare of the film production team. But you see these birds with their valiant struggle against storms and cold and heat. And all they do is fly, and even the act of flying is kind of a desperate flailing, because up close it doesn't look like graceful gliding, it looks like someone running for their life. And the thing is, these birds pretty much keep it up all their lives, going from one part of the world to the next. Although the movie didn't say so, I had to conclude that old birds would get to frail to make the journey and would just fall out of the sky and die, or would get left behind or something.

I think it is good to resist the impulse to anthropomorphize, but I did read someplace that geese mate for life, and the film sort of indulges that kind of detail, showing mating rituals, care for babies and, at one point, a dramatic escape of a captured bird from a cage made by humans. There is also a scene of a caged bird watching free birds fly by, and you can't help but see the great soaring metaphor for humans. If you think about it, it is sort of funny that metaphors for the human spirit are equated with birds and soaring like an eagle, because with this radical camera technology, you see the eyes bulging and wings beating. Overall the effect up close of a bird in flight is probably closer to the reality of the human endeavor, which is to say, it only looks effortless from a distance, there is always some inelegant straining involved.