I now have a much deeper admiration/fear of insects.

A beetle, no more than a half inch long, pushes a clump of dirt three times its size across a landscape of rocks and dirt. It unwittingly impales the clump onto the end of a twig. We watch as the beetle slowly and methodically examines the situation. It digs around the clump, and under it. It tries to push on in the direction it was moving, and impales it further. It pushes it in all directions, and finally in the right one and moves it off its trap, and continues on its way. The camera pulls back to remind us how far the beetle has traveled: a distance of perhaps two feet, which might as well seem like the distance from here to Tokyo.

This scene is Microcosmos: Le peuple de l'herbe in a nutshell. We never do find out where the beetle was going, or why it felt compelled to go to such lengths to bring a piece of dirt with it, but it's fascinating to watch it anyway. The film is a documentary about insects, and the world they inhabit. The title is apt, because it really is a world unto itself, that has only the most minimal connections to the world we live in.

As a person with a pretty strong aversion to bugs, I wasn't exactly enthusiastic about seeing them up close. And my fears were justified: I saw a lot of insects in a lot closer detail than I ever really wanted to. I have a new appreciation for just how disgusting some of those evolutionary freaks can be. But there's no denying that some of the images are simply extraordinary, and the detail is astounding.

There are some Koyaanisqatsi-type shots of flowers blooming and raindrops rippling the surface of a lake (I think Godfrey Reggio should be paid royalties everytime somebody uses time-lapse photography in a film), but the insects are the star of this show, and the film does an excellent job of drawing us into their tiny little world. Blades of grass become gigantic tree trunks, frogs and birds stomp onto the scene in Godzilla-like proportions, and when we see the storm clouds roll in overhead, we don't have to be told that this is going to be bad news for the little creepy crawlies. Water itself poses an entirely different hazard for insects than anything we're used to. For creatures that weigh a fraction of an ounce, breaking the surface tension of water can be the difference between life and death.

The only negative aspect was the lack of any kind of narration, other than at the very beginning and the very end. I understand wanting to avoid boring National-Geographic-style narration, but a lot of the time I simply had no idea what I was looking at. Other than that, though, it's a revolutionary look at the lives of the our most plentiful unseen neighbors.