A Discovery-channel feeling documentary brilliantly brought to the big screen, which starts out as a cunning, silly viewing of penguins waddling around in their South Pole habitat, as narrated by a Disney-style Morgan Freeman. But no sooner do we start giggling than the story turns to the harsh realities of penguin life. What surfaces along with the free-swimming penguins is a persistent question: “What kind of God would deliberately invent a creature destined to suffer so much?” During an amusing sequence, the penguins choose a mate. But once those mates are together, they are bound through blizzards, death, and months of egg tossing between each other’s underbellies, much like a couple of kangaroos without pouches, juggling the egg to keep it from freezing. All this in 80-below-zero temperatures, with 100- mile-an-hour winds – and no food for up to 120 days at a time. When the mother decides to search out food for the soon-to-be born chick, she rolls the egg carefully back to the dad. He doesn’t dare complain. He’s a good husband. In fact, he will sit there starving for four months, shielding the baby from the height of the Antarctic winter. You’ve heard of hen-pecked husbands? Penguin-pecked sounds way worse. All in all, when the chick emerges, months later, we are as tickled as their tuxedo-dressed parents.
