The Kangaroo King

 

Release Date: 2015

Watch Date: May 17, 2023

"Big Red - one kangaroo's epic battle against the outback. The parched central deserts of the red heartland of Australia are home to the toughest kangaroo on the planet - the mighty Red. Above all, this is a story of survival against the odds and what it takes to endure drought, heatwave, and bushfire. Red struggles to prove his strength, not only against others of his kind, but against the very land itself."

    I have never watched a documentary on kangaroos before, which seems surprising to me. I actually know surprisingly very little about kangaroos, or I did before this documentary - because it is actually surprisingly informative.

    This documentary follows one male kangaroo, from birth, gives him a curious personality, and charters his story from legless peanut to the king of the mob, which is an amazing title for any animal. Bob doesn't think they followed the same kangaroo for five years, especially because there is a massive time skip about halfway through the documentary, with literally no footage shown in between the joey stage to the full grown adult male five year old ready to start competing for mates. But that ruins the magic of it, doesn't it Bob, so I'm going to just choose to believe they got no useable footage for five years.

    But it's not only about kangaroos, it's also a generally informative documentary on life in the Australian outback as a whole, and how the droughts and heat waves the animals are used to are only getting harder and harder to survive because of climate change. Which, eight years out, I can tell you was an accurate prediction. Now the narrator makes sure to let us know that, sure, this has been a hard hundred years for the kangaroos, but that they've survived hundreds of thousands. Which is true. But that doesn't mean they're not going to become extinct now. Exctincting animals is kind of a skill humans have perfected over the last several hundred years.

    Now that doesn't mean that just because it's informative, and manages to tell somewhat of a story, that it is not without it's faults. Because the main fault of this film, if I'm going to be honest, is the utter drama that the narrator and music attempts to imbue every single frame of this documentary with. An overly epic soundtrack underscores every event, and the way the script describes events as they happen makes it just a little too dramatic and over the top. Hard to take any of it seriously, no matter how interesting the information is, when it's being told over a soaring soundtrack that wouldn't be out of place in an Avatar film.

    As a last point, and I mean no offense to any kangaroos, they look dumb when they stand up. They just do. Close to the ground and hopping, kangaroos make sense and they look cute. Standing up to wrestle or stretch, they look...wrong. It's just bad. And it makes me laugh, every, single time.

    Other than the general silliness of the kangaroo image, and if you can get past the drama of it all, this is actually a fairly solid and informative documentary, that kept Bob and I engaged throughout, and had us walking away with new information, which at this point is all I'm asking from my documentaries.