Review: Bears

76. Bears
"Bears" was the first documentary I've seen in theatres this year, and I can't say that I was very impressed. The scenery was beautiful and was captured well by the cinematography, but it was in the assemblage of that footage into a final cut that the film fell apart.

For a "documentary", the film often hewed annoyingly close to traditional plot structure, especially at the end. Most movies have the moment at the climax where all appears lost, but then the heroes manage to overcome adversity at the last instant and emerge victorious. That's all well and good, but I don't need that shoehorned into a documentary. This film gets to the point where the bear family is ready to just lay down and die because they haven't found enough food to last them for the winter. But then, at the last minute, they find a stream so full of salmon that all the bears in the area get along peacefully, so they are free to eat their fill without fear of being attacked. I am very skeptical that this was the actual series of events that took place, and I find it insulting that the film was edited this way. Either make a nature documentary or make a film telling a traditional narrative--don't try to do both.

I was also not at all a fan of John C. Reilly's narration. It called way too much attention to itself. Instead of just being an objective narrator, he often spoke in character as the animals, usually in ways that trivialized what was really happening on screen by making them seem more "human". That may be entertaining for kids (who, admittedly, are the target audience for the film), but I found it distracting and unnecessary. Why not let the images just speak for themselves, with only minimal narration being used to explain what was happening. The kids would still enjoy themselves, and they'd leave the theatre with a better understanding of what the situations they'd seen were really like.

I remember seeing nature documentaries on television when I was a kid that were far better than this. It's unfortunate that the best way to get one into theaters is to dumb it down.