More than Honey
Director: Markus Imhoof
Rating: (M)
Three stars (out of five)
More than Honey isn't the first feature documentary to tackle the global honeybee crisis, or even the best; that honour is still held by Queen of the Sun.
What director Markus Imhoof and his talented team of cinematographers have done, though, is give their audience a unique perspective on bee behaviour through sequences constructed from macro footage captured at ultra-high frame rates.
From California's travelling beekeepers to the painstaking attempts to pollinate plants without bees in China; the message of colony collapse disorder and the impending repercussions are touched upon, but the science gets buried in the spectacle.
Even with small cameras mounted on remote control helicopters and a host of other tricks, there is a certain irreverence taken with the topic.
With one in three crops that we eat dependent on honeybee pollination, it seems odd that some steely journalistic vigour has been sacrificed.
More than Honey is style over substance.
It's pretty easy to just sit back and marvel at the majesty and perhaps that's the point.
Once you have been confronted with such fascinating images of bees, it's not hard to empathise with their plight and for that matter, ours.
Though quite what is ''really'' at stake is never fully realised.
Best thing: The ''Bee-cam''.
Worst thing: The narrator's Sir David Attenborough impersonation.
See it with: An understanding of colony collapse disorder.
- Mark Orton
