"The Last Lions" Review by Aaron Dentel-Post

It’s true: the lions are adorable. The cubs, with their golden fur and playfully splayed paws wrestle gaily while mother and father nuzzle and bask in the savannah’s setting sun. But I wouldn’t recommend seeing “The Last Lions” because the kitties are cute.

True to the form of its National Geographic heritage, the film’s frames are like shiny still shots, snatched straight from the magazine and imbued with life. Captured by Geographic’s masterful cinematographers, the African wilderness has never looked more beautiful, more alive and, in some ways, more gruesome and heartbreaking.

Shortly after the picture-perfect, family friendly introduction, the life of our main character, the lioness Ma di Tau, is thrown into disarray. When an invading pride of lions leaves her mate mutilated on the African plain with an eye missing, and she flees with their three surviving cubs and begins an epic fight for survival.

The story is brutal, from beginning to end, is graphically gruesome and often seems unkindly sad. Coupled with cinematography of epic scope, a story of this caliber speaks for itself, which makes it unfortunate that narrator Jeremy Irons does so much dramatization on his own. The script is heavy on dialogue and delves into lion psychology and characterizations more than necessary, which often bring serious scenes close to the brink of comedy.

But this isn’t to say the characters don’t convince. Quite the opposite — the heroes are inspiring, the villains bone chilling, and the crocodiles ominous. Ma di Tau’s two main antagonists are a silver-eyed rival lioness and the scar-faced leader of a water buffalo herd that she hunts to keep her cubs alive. During much of the film, our chief lioness walks a knife-edge of survival, and doesn’t always come out on top. The film is suspenseful and difficult to watch. Keep the children at home.

A cinematic experience to say the least, the movie also functions as a way to raise money for the Big Cats Initiative. While the prologue and ending credits contain conservational messages about the extinction of big cats at the hands of humans, this barely plays a part at all in the film. These informational messages come across as heavy handed attempts to guilt viewers into contributing money, in part because so little of the intended message comes across in the film.

Go see the movie. Seriously, go see it. It’s one of the few movies really worth seeing on the big screen because of its unparalleled cinematography. Just be prepared to have your heart melted, broken, re-broken, re-broken again, and then melted again.