Each year for thousands of years, the emperor penguins of Antarctica, all at the same time, start marching, mostly single-file. They're headed on a seventy-mile journey across the continent to their traditional mating grounds, away from the sea and in toward the areas where the ice is thicker. In what passes for summer in Antarctica, the thinner ice toward the edges of the continent melts, and the penguins don't want their eggs falling through holes in the ice. When they finally arrive, they go about selecting mates; after a few months, the female lays an egg. She passes it to the male, who cradles it on top of his feet while the female walks the 70 miles back to the water to eat. By the time she gets back, the egg has hatched, and the male is protecting a fragile chick from the elements. He passes the chick to the female and starts for the coast. This process repeats for most of a year, until the chick is old enough to be left on its own.

A lot of the film is frankly amazing: that the penguins can go for so long without food, that the males can stand there in the horrific storms of the Antarctic without moving for two months, that both parents take turns on 70-mile hikes to a hole in the ice so they can refuel. The film's tagline informs us that "in the harshest place on Earth, love finds a way," but it's not really love that the film is talking about. It's a celebration of evolution, of the process that could develop a creature as unlikely as the penguin in a place as unlikely as Antarctica. I'm not religious, but I could understand a religious person looking at these odd creatures and seeing the hand of God at work.

If this sounds like the makings of a National Geographic special, well, it is. It's "elevated" (as if there were something wrong with National Geographic specials) by the presence of Morgan Freeman, who "tells" the film—one might call him a narrator, but his narration is more in the form of telling a story, so I suppose the "as told by Morgan Freeman" line is acceptable. Freeman, with his rich voice and self-deprecating manner, was the perfect choice as a narrator, but one of the film's biggest problems is what he's asked to say. Instead of the dry, informative narration in a typical National Geographic special, this film wants to tell a cute tale of love and survival. It's somewhat misleading: it leads inevitably to the anthropomorphization of the penguins' behavior—the concept of "love" is for our benefit, so that we can see a bit of ourselves in what is mostly instinct.

The film's narration veers between two poles: (1) these are weird little creatures, and (2) they're just like us. It often fails to strike a balance between the two, but it sticks mostly to the human interest side of the story. The cutesy narration often relies too heavily on euphemisms; perhaps because of the film's G rating, it skirts around the topic of death, choosing on two occasions to tell of lost or old penguins as "disappearing" instead of dying. Also, because it decided to focus on the humanistic (penguinistic?) side of things, I was left with a lot of questions that would have been answered by a typical National Geographic special. For instance, I can't tell the males and the females apart. Maybe there's no way to tell, but I'd have liked the film to at least say so.

There's a second film here, one that I'd like to see as much as I wanted to see this one: the story of how the filmmakers managed to get the film made. We get some tantalizing glimpses of it in the end credits, as we see orange-clad men with ice in their eyebrows dragging equipment across the desolate plains. Some of the shots in the film are so amazing that I wanted to see how they were achieved, and I'd like to know more about the filmmakers' experiences living alongside the penguins for most of a year. Maybe it will all show up on the special edition of the DVD.

I wish one of two things: that I had seen this film in an IMAX theater, or that it had relied a little more on science and a little less on whimsy. Without one of the two, I find that I have the nagging feeling that I didn't get my money's worth, that the film might as well have been a National Geographic television special instead of a theatrical release. Had it been the size of an aircraft carrier, I would have been blown away by the visuals enough that my complaints about content wouldn't matter. Had it been more interested in informing us than in telling a cute story, I wouldn't have been left disappointed in all of the questions it didn't answer. Not that I'm complaining too fiercely, mind you—it was still cute and enjoyable, and on a 100-degree day, there's nowhere I'd rather have been than in a theater showing a movie about Antarctica.