You’ve already seen once my disdain for Christian extremists. This week I found one more reason when we went to see “La Marche de l’empereur (2005),” or “March of the Penguins” if you, like me, can only read English.
As you may be aware, the Christian Right have adopted this movie as an example of both monogamy and Intelligent Design. If you’ve seen the film you’ll realise that it’s neither.
The idea that a creature most comfortable in the water walking over seventy miles several times a year is proof of intelligent design is, frankly, laughable. And the monogamy bit is only slightly more convincing. Yes, they do have a single partner but only for one mating season. Next year, should they survive, they’ll find someone new.
Fortunately none of this distracts from the film. It isn’t especially deep or meaningful and it doesn’t go into detail as much as, say, an Attenborough series on the BBC would. It’s beautifully shot. The commentary is generally interesting, although it does lapse into easy anthropomorphism rather too frequently.
Enjoyable and worth seeing, just not necessarily for the reasons that some people tell you…
Continuing on the theme of the Christian right and their amusing interpretations of current films, I looked up Chronicles of Narnia on the CAP website. It fared better than the Lord of the Rings (violent and “offensive to God”) or Harry Potter (also “offensive to God” in that magic = BAD.) Their main beef with Narnia was that it, “appears to be a blend of what may be cautiously paralleled with the Gospel mixed with paganism and maybe Gaiaism.” OH NO! At least The Passion of the Christ is just a film…
As for March of the Penguins, it scored 97/100, losing two points for wanton violence/crime (“death by predator attack (no gore) and death by freezing”) and one point for sexual immorality (“animal copulation (non-sensuous)”). Actually, I thought the breeding scene was incredibly sensuous and lacked any hint of animal copulation. They’ll never hire me to review their films, will they???