PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 6/23/05)

It's tempting when watching Luc Jacquet's March of the Penguins to think of the movie's emperor penguin subjects as human. In fact, it's practically encouraged. The penguins are "not that different from us," insists narrator Morgan Freeman, who introduces the film as "a story of love." Freeman is clearly enraptured with the little birds. You can almost see the Oscar winner's eyes twinkling as he offers his sage if all-too-often sentimental commentary throughout the picture. But are they really anything like us?

Every winter, emperor penguins march 70 miles across the frozen Antarctic wasteland, shuffling single-file (or sometimes sliding on their bellies) to reach the point where the ice is thickest. There they search for a partner and mate. "Penguins are monogamous, sort of," Freeman says, by which he means they are fiercely loyal to their partners for the span of eight months, after which all bets are off. During that time, the penguin couples will alternate caring for their offspring. After the female lays her precious egg, she will transfer it to the male, who must keep it balanced on his curled feet for two months while the females retrace the 70 miles back to the water to collect food. Then they will trade places.

Oh, Mr. Freeman, please remind us, exactly how are these penguins like humans again (besides their willingness to bare all for reality camera crews, of course)? If anything, it's the degree to which the animals differ from us that makes March of the Penguins so fascinating. Captivating in its own right, this is not the same version of the film that awed Sundance. It's considerably shorter and "less French" (according to one publicist), but I can't help wondering whether this sentimental new approach might actually be "too American."

For instance, viewers would probably weep every time an egg — or worse, a fluffy baby penguin — succumbs to the freezing cold even without Freeman calling the parents' loss "unbearable." As repackaged for an American audience, the movie has more to say about our country's "culture of life" than Million Dollar Baby did, making me yearn for that other Sundance sensation, Grizzly Man, in which Werner Herzog takes the less popular position that wild bears and humans are not in fact the same, and that sometimes nature does what it has to do, even if that involves eating the humans who so eagerly anthropomorphize them.—Peter Debruge