Badge Film Blog

Between the lines: the agendas behind recent releases

One Life peddles one big lie

The claim that animals are just the same as people is spurious conservationist propaganda, but it's there in a trio of new films
Gorilla tactics ... a still from the BBC's One Life. View larger picture
Gorilla tactics ... a still from the BBC's One Life. Click for full image. Photo: Alamy

If the box has cloyed your appetite for the wonders of the wild, prepare to be amazed all over again. The marvel that is nature is migrating to the lusher pastures of the big screen.

  1. One Life
  2. Production year: 2011
  3. Country: UK
  4. Cert (UK): U
  5. Runtime: 84 mins
  6. Directors: Martha Holmes, Michael Gunton
  7. Cast: Daniel Craig
  8. More on this film

In London this week you can catch the elephants and orangutans of Born to Be Wild in gorgeous IMAX 3D. Wherever you live, you may soon find it hard to avoid Astonish Me, a celebration of newly discovered species that calls on the talents of Bill Nighy, Gemma Arterton, Stephen Poliakoff and Charles Sturridge and will serve as a warm-up for the summer's blockbusters in participating Odeons.

In the vanguard of this stampede, as you might expect, is the BBC. Its matchless animal magic is now being amplified for the cinema, and the weekend saw this ambition's first real fruit rolled out across the nation. Specially developed technology used in One Life included super-high speed cameras that can slow down action by a factor of 80, a stabilised camera that can travel in the midst of a herd of beasts and an HD macro-camera that can lay bare hitherto invisible life forms.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the scenes captured are staggeringly impressive. If you're to appreciate them, however, you'll also have to endure a voiceover from Daniel Craig that's no less staggeringly irksome. The film, you see, has a message, and you're not allowed to forget it. The clue's in the title. Hear ye this: the lives of our brute fellow creatures are as one with our own.

One Life insists that the thing about animals is that they're just the same as us. Capuchin monkeys use tools: they crack nuts using a stone as a hammer and bare rock as an anvil, and teach their offspring to do the same. Cheetahs have learned the benefits of teamwork. Grandma elephants correct their daughters' parenting mistakes. Grebes enjoy romantic courtship dances. "Ants are farmers, architects and engineers," according to Craig's voiceover.

Animals not only share our virtues but surpass us in their pursuit. We may feel that human mothers do a pretty reasonable job, but they've got nothing on the mother octopus. She starves herself so she can spend weeks blowing water over her eggs just to keep them cool. "Her babies mean so much to her that she is willing to die for them," drones 007.

When it comes to animals, One Life assures us, "we see so much of us in them and them in us: grace, determination and even love". We do seem to see these things in the film, but how much are they really there?

Darwinism and then genetics shocked us into appreciating that the gulf between ourselves and the rest of the animate world is not as deep as our ancestors thought it was. Nonetheless we're still different, as the reaction against evolutionary psychology is currently reminding us.

Consciousness gives human behaviour a character of its own, investing it with forethought, awareness of consequence and therefore moral choice. Animals are innocent of such things. A self-sacrificial octopus is therefore no more worthy of applause than a cat who tortures mice is worthy of blame. So why are films like One Life so determined to tell us otherwise?

Anthropomorphic sentimentality may be a proven big-screen crowdpleaser, but there's more to it than that. Morgan Freeman, the veteran of March of the Penguins who also narrates Born to Be Wild, explains that he took the gig because the film "highlights the danger of what we're doing as humans in terms of the rest of the life-forms on the planet". Like so many of his fellow toilers in this vineyard, he wants to contribute to a propaganda project. Portraying the wild has become inextricably entangled with the conservation crusade. Astonish Me has actually been made by the WWF.

If we can be persuaded to feel kinship with our fellow creatures, we become more likely to support their protection. Understandably, those eager to save threatened species are therefore anxious to foster this feeling by any available means. Their cause enjoys such unquestioning approbation that few complain or even notice. Yet the conservation narrative is not quite as robust as it may seem.

We're asked to believe that we and our furred and feathered siblings are conjoined inalienably in a grand chain of being. The failure of any link is supposed to threaten our survival. Unfortunately, this is untrue. Of all the species that have ever existed, 99.9% have already become extinct. Life has gone on, and the harsh truth is that we could manage without pandas and orangutans.

Some believe that we humans have no right, God-given or otherwise, to displace our fellow creatures from the habitat that we share with them. Others feel that these creatures' aesthetic appeal is so overwhelming that their demise is simply unthinkable. Sadly, neither of these attitudes is universally shared.

So the cause needs a bogus boost. Cinema, it seems, will be doing its bit to provide one.

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Gorilla tactics ... a still from the BBC's One Life. Photograph: Alamy