Happy Feet Two (review)

It’s all this “global warming” nonsense again, just like in the first movie. Propaganda! Now it’s a “berg of doom” that has broken off from melting, greening Antarctica -- as if that could happen -- and blocked all the cute widdle waddlers in their valley, cut off from the ocean and food. So what? If they’re not clever enough to invent an elevator or whatever and save themselves, they don’t deserve to live. Survival of the fittest! This ridiculous movie would have us believe that cooperation and -- *shudder* -- altruism are “reasonable” survival practices, as if people (or penguins) being nice to one another was any way to organize the world.

Oh, but it gets even worse! There’s a subplot with a krill who smartly wants to embrace rugged individualism and break away from the swarm, and this left-wing nightmare of a movie has the audacity to imply that he can be part of a group and still be an individual at the same time! Filmmaker George Miller used to have the right way of things with his Mad Max movies: now there was a rugged individual! now there was a libertarian utopia! But now Miller is attempting to raise idiotic treehuggery and socialism to the level of Grand Drama, for here we have arctic waterfowl singing magnificent operas about their encounters with humans, “the aliens who rule the seas” who kindly rescue them from the “black death.” (Oh, but we know, Miller, we know that we humans are supposed to accept the blame for the oil spill these birds were caught up in, as if it were our fault we’re at the top of the food chain, and the industrial chain.)

My god, the hippie shit never ends: Change might feel scary and unnatural but that’s okay; wishful thinking isn’t enough when faced with a challenge, action is required; penguins like electric guitar; there are always reasons to dance. Wah wah wah. And it’s all delivered by famous liberal activist movie stars like Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, just to twist the knife.

If you can believe it, “Adapt or die” is seen as a cheerful thing here -- adapting, that is, in order to avoid dying. What’s so bad about dying? Maybe the world doesn’t actually need penguins at all. But you won’t get that message from liberal Hollywood, no sirree.