MICROCOSMOS Starring Assorted Insects. Directed by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou. Category I. Opens June 26 at Broadway and UA (Sha Tin, Queensway, Whampoa) It is a case of the bug versus the beast. In a prime example of creative marketing, Edko Films are going head-to-head with Steven Spielberg's The Lost World by releasing this micro-documentary about insects at the same time as the dino-epic.
Although the assorted bugs can never compete with Spielberg's digital dinos, Microcosmos does have wider appeal than most nature documentaries. Made by French biologists Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou, and benefiting from two years of preparation and a further three in shooting, the 77-minute film takes the viewer down to grass level to present an insect's-eye view of the world and each other.
Some new camera technology, invented by the film-makers themselves, gets so close to the various insects on show that they cease to become forgettable bugs and fill the screen as resplendent creatures in their own right, taking on human personalities.
Consequently, some new - and unlikely - movie stars hit the screen for the first time: a tenacious scarab beetle struggling with a ball of dung, a ladybird taking wing, a cohort of caterpillars, the water-loving argyronet spider, and a number of others. After taking us down from the skies into the grass (the French title is The Grass People ), the directors present the animals doing their thing in glorious close-up, to a musical score that veers from wishy-washy new age atmospheric to full-scale opera.
If it sounds boring, it isn't - and it's miles away from the usual educational documentary. For a start, there's no informative voice-over giving us the facts and figures about the various species: we simply watch them performing one or two actions in extreme close-up.
The insect actors fill the screen, and, thus enlarged, lose all of their unpleasant appearances: this big, every one of them looks beautiful. What's more, we interpret their various tics and gesticulations as we would a human actor.