Review of One Life

"One Life" is for the most part a brilliant documentary about life in the animal kingdom. My chief complaint is the scene about the shoal of fish where they hide in a crowd to conceal themselves. The birds dive bomb them from the air while the dolphins and swordfish attack them from the depths. I saw this same ritual enacted in another BBC documentary. The rest of the action, like the dragons stalking the water buffalo, the fox pursuing the ibex, and the mouse eluding the lizard, is outstanding because the filmmakers explain the strategy of survival in the animal kingdom. The birds that mate and dance were cool. Basically, if these sequences have been done before, then my complaint would have applied. However, I haven't seen enough animal documentaries to skewer the filmmakers on repetition. I sat through this 85 minute feature and was dazzled by the complex as well as complicated cinematography and the extent to which the filmmakers went to make everything seem so cinematic. The scene about the ants cutting down blades of grass so they could take them back to their ant bed to feed the grass to a fungus that the ants thrived on was fantastic. Similarly, the ants created ventilation shafts to clear out all the carbon monoxide that got trapped in their kingdom that would kill them from the interaction between the grass and the fungus. The sequence about the monkeys using rocks to smash their food so they could eat it was terrific, too. Daniel Craig did a fabulous job with his beautiful English accent in the narration.