Microcosmos (1996)

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Blistering performances.

The word 'insect' in the minds of most people brings about images of destructive, disease-carrying 'bugs', flies, maggots, cockroaches. But if Microcomos does anything, it reminds me that there are hundreds of thousands of constructive insects that are simply beautiful.The directors of this film spent a number of years using microscopic cameras to capture breathtaking images of hundreds of insects in their natural habitat (in this case, a meadow in France). They select just the right music for a scene in which a pheasant who attacks and ant colony. Two snails seem locked in some time of embrace, a ladybug tries to take off but has a little trouble getting off the ground.'Microcosmos' fits the category of a documentary. But depending on how you take the behavior of these amazing creatures its a love story (two snails who seem deeply in love), a war movie (two beetles lock in moral struggle), a child-birth film (several insects giving birth), a disaster movie (a rainstorm in which the drops seem like a meteor storm) and a monster movie (a pheasant that attacks an ant colony). I sometimes felt like and interloper peering down into their lives in their most intimate moments.I saw a movie a few years back called 'The Scent of Green Papaya' which contained a scene of a curious little girl squatted down on the ground smiling as she watched a colony of ants at work. I wondered about that and when I saw 'Microcosmos' I felt that I had a ringside seat at what had captivated her.

The second time I watched this I started wondering whether there was any difference between this and the 'cute' anthropomorphic Disney films I own on Super 8. Take away forty years of lens technology and you're left with "Sloth vs. Jaguar", right? Well not quite - for one thing it's erotic, thanks in part but not entirely to the enhanced capacity for intimacy that those lenses provide. For another, it's got a bit of a structure, and it aims for mystery. Also, it confines the stupid voice-over to the bookends, not that I wouldn't rather that they dispatched it entirely, which goes double for the sporadic John Villiamsisms of the soundtrack. While I eventually stopped suspecting CGI, I do not doubt that some of it was staged, including one of my favourite scenes, the dung beetle rolling the dirt ball. Still, there's a lot of beauty in here, and even some small portion of the 'mystery' is justified by the content. We'd been waiting to see some of these facts of life first-hand for a long, long time.

"Beyond anything we could imagine, yet almost beneath our notice." An exquisite film, painfully beautiful. It's relatively easy to find beauty in the majestic Grand Tetons, Monument Valley, or the brooding giants of a Big Tree forest. This film finds incredible beauty unnoticed at our feet.Ants drinking raindrops, or clustered around a tiny puddle -- then sharing back at the nest.Caterpillars marching in close formation.Ladybugs as the voracious predators they are. Ants protecting their aphids from the ladybug. Ants drinking the nectar exuded by the aphids they farm.Two snails locked in loving embrace.Alien-looking mantids suddenly taking notice of the camera.Beetles in extended combat. We are not shown why.A mosquito emerging from pupa. A butterfly also. A caterpillar hatching from an egg -- then eating the shell.Winged ants crowding out of the nest for their nuptial flight.Caterpillars in weird diversity, one with two horns on its posterior that extrude and retract bright red filaments. What /are/ they?The film is almost entirely visual. There are only a few seconds of voice-over at beginning and end, and the soundtrack is very low-key, for the most part, of the natural sounds of the action. Occasional light touches of music or choral voices nicely complement the photography.I was struck by the cleanliness! Bugs cleaning, cleaning, cleaning! Even an earthworm emerging from burrow glistens in pristine translucent beauty. After viewing this film, how could anyone say that bugs are dirty?

If you know the documentary "Le peuple migrateur" (or "Winged Migration" in Enlgish) and you loved it, than you also must give "Microcosmos: Le peuple de l'herbe" a try. It's not exactly the same of course, but you'll certainly recognize the same style of images and narration and the idea behind it.This time it isn't about birds, but about insects. I know, many people don't like those creepy little creatures and to be honest, neither do I, but why shouldn't you try to get to know them a little bit better? Indeed, there's no reason why not, except for when you are terrified to even watch them on a TV-screen of course. And when you watch this documentary, I can assure you that it will surprise you, because this is the first time anybody has ever watched and portrayed these little animals in such a magnificent way. You are really able to penetrate their world and to see that meadow, pond or garden in which they live as one giant universe, their world. I'm not saying that I started to love insects after seeing this movie, but I certainly learned to see them in a different perspective. I guess that they'll never be my favorites, but that doesn't mean of course that this documentary isn't nice to watch. The fact that everything was shot in close-up, sometimes even with time-laps camera's, just to show every little detail, makes this a very interesting view on their little world that we know so little of. I give this movie a 7/10.