j* movie reviews 2020

Okavango: River of Dreams (Director's Cut-2020)

Do yourself a favour and at least watch the Marilyn Manson backed trailer.

The trailer made me super excited for a 90s alternative soundtracked nature doco - those two things just marry so, so perfectly. Sweet Dreams are made of Marilyn Manson and gory nature red in tooth and claw. And this particular doco does feel like it backs the often violent inter-species interactions a bit more than most. But the song is sadly just a standalone intro, which is sad. Is this a genre, alt-rock-nature-doco? Because I am here for it - please provide me links of any attempts because I feel I will enjoy it even more than a Taylor Swift-Linkin Park mash up. More than if Vikings actually had an ACDC soundtrack. Most of the Okavango's music is pretty standard, with occasionally rockesque sounds.

(I'm not making that up - the original ads for Vikings came with ACDC - sadly lacking in the show)

Now this film is a director's cut from a tv series, and I do feel at time maybe this shows a little - having seen that the tv show has chapters. This claims to be a love letter to the river herself - yes - she is apparently a female river as told but not explained early on. So in theory this film follows the flow of the river and the associated animal dramas.

However, the Okavango is a super different kind of river. It is not a "river" in the way most people understand a river in that it never flows tidily out to sea nor runs together from a series of tributaries to form one big flow that dumps into a lake. In someways the Okavango is like a backwards river, a nice big flow that eventually spreads out into a sort of mega-swamp, evaporates and disappears until the next rains. And this film does not really do the best at explaining this key feature, considering how unusual it is, and how central the river is supposed to be to this story.

Anyway. The Okavango is a super full-on place for large aggregations of African animals - in my time I've read many a 50s-70s type animal nerd safari story set in the general vicinity. And the cinematography of these beasties is spectacular. Of particular note here, I feel, is what I see as a larger than normal number of interspecies shots where sometimes strange bedfellows are filmed together, either interacting or passing each other by. You have all the usual suspects, lions, hyenas, painted dogs, elephants, zebra, hippo, leopards, wildebeests, antelopes, warthogs, flamingos... and a couple of lesser filmed species. The Carmine bee-eaters, the shag/cormorant colony, termites and the standout being a super-rare, as in so rare it's the only one known, hybrid antelope.

There are a few times where they seem to get distracted from the river as narrative and try to pin the story back to an animal family or two, as is more usual in a nature doco. I kind of get why they did it, but there was so much power in the strong water structure when they used it, the beautiful footage of the animals splashing about and working and reworking the forms of the river. Not that that lame lioness, the leopard with twins and the other animal families weren't fun. Just that I thought there was a real point of difference in the focus on the river as a nearly sentient existence.

Anyway, the footage is super gorgeous. Watch it with good speakers if you can because the rumbling animal vibrations are also quite epic. Even if they don't make up for the lack of rock.

J* gives it 4 stars.

PS. It's always hard to judge a narration by any bar but Attenborough, and that is unfair to compare mere mortals to gods. This guy does a pretty good job, although again the script wavers a bit between poetical and straightforward factual.

Okavango: River of Dreams (Director's Cut-2020) BOFA 94mins

This film is available to stream for FREE via BOFA - Breath of Fresh Air Film Festival Tasmania. Viewing is open to all Australians via registration.