Winged Migration (2001)

Winged Migration is a 2001 documentary about various migrating birds, featuring up-close-and-personal footage of birds in flight. To best descibe the film’s background, here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry:

The movie was shot over the course of four years on all seven continents. Shot using in-flight cameras, most of the footage is aerial, and the viewer appears to be flying alongside birds of successive species, especially Canada geese. They traverse every kind of weather and landscape, covering vast distances in a flight for survival. The filmmakers exposed over 590 miles of film to create an 89-minute piece. In one case, two months of filming in one location was edited down to less than one minute in the final film.

I heard about it, and watched maybe 15 mins of it in 2006 at my sister-in-law’s house on their widescreen television (also a first for me.) At the time, I was fairly amazed at watching migratory birds in flight, and in widescreen. This was only three years after the documentary came out. Five years after that, I finally get the chance to watch the entire film through Netflix. Finally!

So here’s the thing. It was “meh” for me. WHAT?!? Meh? What do I mean? What’s wrong? I love documentaries, especially nature documentaries. I’ve watched them since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I love HD. I should love nature documentaries filmed in HD. What was wrong? Um, here’s the worst part — I didn’t even bother finishing it. It wasn’t a bad documentary at all. It was pretty neat. The thing is, after the first 45 minutes of watching birds in flight, it all became more of the same. I found it kind of boring, actually, and I’m sorry to say that, but it’s true. Every 5-10 minutes, it was another species of birds…. in flight.

What can I say? I wasn’t that impressed. Instead of trying to slug through it, I decided to chalk it up as a loss, and returned it.

Winged Migration (2001)

Winged Migration (2001)

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