Too many bugs, way too much time

By Brian Levinson

Bugs. Bugs drinking. Bugs eating. Bugs eating smaller bugs. Bugs getting eaten by larger bugs. Bugs metamorphasizing from slimy wormy bugs into fuzzy flying bugs. Bugs screwing. Bugs just kind of hanging around.

Read the previous paragraph, over and over for about an hour and fifteen minutes, and you'll understand the entirety of the plot, dialogue, and action in Microcosmos, the new film from Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou. Aside from a theme song sung at the pitch of the Emergency Broadcast System and a brief voice over from some pretentious British lady, there's nothing in this movie but bugs. Even Bruno Coulais's interesting score is often obscured by the insects' symphony of squirmy chattering.

It took Nuridsany and Perennou three years to make Microcosmos, and six months to edit it. With specially-designed cameras, they ventured beneath the tall weeds of a grassy French meadow, and went incredibly deep into the personal lives of French insects. The world they discovered is an often beautiful, yet usually harsh, jungle landscape. Blades of grass stretch upwards like fairy-tale beanstalks, a pond becomes a vast ocean, and flowers have cavernous, nectar-filled interior regions. The main characters of Disney's Honey, I Shrunk The Kids would probably get killed here in about five messy seconds.

As nasty and irritating as they can often be, the bugs themselves are revealed to be incredibly complex creatures, pursuing daily tasks and rituals of which humans have no conception. Caterpillars crawl, single file, to drink together at a stream of water. Another insect emerges from, and then eats, its larval sac. Mosquitoes dart effortlessly across a pond's surface, evading the predation of frogs and salamanders. Each insect is revealed as an entirely unique creature; a literal world of difference is exposed between the awkward flight of a ladybug and the graceful one of a bumblebee. As the film goes on, the audience begins to notice distinct differences between members of the same species; different bees, it seems, have different personalities.

And the film does go on. And on. Microcosmos ads, depicting a praying mantis in sunglasses, brag that the movie "is Jurassic Park in your own backyard!" Do not let this fool you. First, at 75 minutes, the film is only as long as a typical Yale biology lecture--and is often twice as dull. Second, the insects mainly eat each other, not human actors; and although it's somewhat interesting to watch a spider kill a grasshopper, neither this nor anything else in the movie provides the viewer anything close to excitement. There's only so much anyone can take of watching bugs doing bug things, many of them disgusting, and Microcosmos really pushes this rather sketchy genre to the limit. Nuridsany and Perennou try to present their world as one of infinite wonder, but the sense of amazement the viewer feels at the beginning wears off pretty damn quickly. By the film's end, I was hoping a kid with a magnifying glass would come along and fry the whole "cast."

Despite Microcosmos' high boredom factor, the photography is undeniably gorgeous. On such a small scale, some of the bugs--butterflies, the more colorful caterpillars--are invested with beauty, and certain scenes (two ants drinking from a dewdrop, a glistening carnivorous plant devouring a bee) are striking and highly memorable. The movie's problem is this: most of the bugs are repulsive, and most of the things they do are absolutely disgusting. When you could chose seeing Luke kick the Dark Side's ass in Return of the Jedi, is there anybody who really wants to see a dung beetle rolling an enormous sheep turd up a pile of dirt? Or nasty close-ups of slimy bee larvae? Or two snails, animals which are essentially giant boogers with shells, doing the nasty (the ugliest love scene since Deliverance)?

I hope not.

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