This is a fabulous film to watch, but I’m sure I liked it more when it came out 10 years ago. The same things that annoyed me then annoyed me again this time, but even more. The worst thing is the syn hush music. It was just an absolutely terrible choice that actually took me out of the film with its sshh-sshh-sshh rather than engaging me in what was happening on-screen. And while I found the irrepressible French cuteness bothersome 10 years ago, it grated this time around: the poor, hurt bird getting eaten by crabs; the caged goose looking up at its free cousins; the goose abandoned by buds out west and rediscovering them; the boy helping the goose free itself at the farm and awaiting its return the next year, the goose that falls in oil in eastern Europe; the migrating birds getting shot by hunters. It’s hard to imagine a string of more obvious, cloying sentimentality.
Those considerable reservations aside, there are many, many beautiful images in this film – so many that the movie rises above its many bad directorial choices. The close-ups of birds in flight, taken with great ingenuity and effort, are simply the standard now and have forever earned Winged Migration a place in the documentary/wildlife pantheon. The Making of documentary on the blu-ray shows the effort and thought that went into these, and I was almost as moved by that supplement as I was by the feature. I won’t soon forget images like the storks over the desert, flying into an oasis that Turner might have painted if he’d gone to Libya. Then there are the geese in snow, the birds crossing the Himalayas, the birds flying through New York and through Paris, and the migration over the fall colors. And while the scenes of the birds in Monument Valley were odd (do birds even migrate through there?), I sorta liked yet another French homage to John Ford and the French fascination with the American West, even though it was oddly out of place. Ditto for the tern who looked like it was flying over a screen capture of Google maps – weird, but sorta fun. You have to admire this film. I only wish someone with more directorial savvy had put it together after the successful filming had been done.
