The nature images in the documentary Arctic Tale were obviously difficult to get, requiring Canadian nature specialist Sarah Robertson and her husband Adam Ravetch to spend years in the arctic tundra and ice with their cameras.
The two filmmakers focused on two animal families, in one case the saga of a mother polar bear and her two cubs, in the other the challenges facing a walrus cub after her birth.
These images are absolutely stunning to witness, even if it is an odd pairing to twin these species. In many instances, the footage is startlingly fresh and new, because Robertson-Ravetch show behaviour that has been rarely documented and even more rarely offered with this level of quality and clarity.
It is a feat comparable to what it took to film the life cycles of emperor penguins in the Antarctic for March of the Penguins.
Now for the bad news.
Robertson, making her directorial debut with this American production, manipulates her images in a manner that distorts the truth and brings into question what a documentary film is supposed to do.
Using folksy narrator Queen Latifah to tell the saga, the stories of bear and walrus are told as a narrative. Yet the images are composites. Many different animals are involved.
In other words, it is almost as if Arctic Tale is acted out, with several animals playing each role, with arbitrary decisions of narrative being created by the filmmakers, not by nature. The film is more related to Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Bear than it is to classic nature docs.
The trick is that Annaud never claimed to be making a doc; he was making a colourful fiction that suggested a greater truth about his subjects, much like crafting a myth.
But Arctic Tale leaves the impression with any reasonable viewer that what you see is just the way it happened, from the tragedies to the joys, from the births to the maturation processes of bear and walrus.
Cheating with this footage seems unnecessary. It makes the film seem unbelievable and overly anthropomorphic. The approach also undermines what is a crucial element: Warning audiences of the real dangers of global climate crisis to the fragile ecology of the arctic.
One of the co-writers of the script here is Kristin Gore, Al Gore's daughter. Arctic climate change is another inconvenient truth -- and potentially catastrophic for the animal species depicted.
That message is compromised another way. The music choices for Arctic Tale just suck.
It is not that I demand Inuit throat singers be used -- although that would satisfy my own personal tastes and would suggest the human side of the arctic. But Cat Stevens? Jeez! R&B classics such as Celebrate and We Are Family? Sheesh! The tone is all wrong, way too obvious in terms of lyrics and just lugubrious when layered in on the nature stories.
With that kind of music and the problems with discerning "the truth" behind the images, the cheap scenes -- such as the extended walrus fart joke -- bring the film down to cartoon level. You expect more from a film with the National Geographic label attached.
(This film is rated G)
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