Bug's-Eye View

By JAY COCKS

Not since 2001 has a movie so cannily inverted consciousness and altered audience perception as The Hellstrom Chronicle. It is a wry and scarifying cautionary tale, whose point is most neatly summed up by the fictional scientist-narrator Dr. Nils Hellstrom: "The insect has the answer because he never asked the question." In scene after remarkable scene, assorted species of insect are shown as unreasoning, unfeeling creatures who will survive the kind of atomic cataclysm that man, with his superior intellect, continues to shape for himself. "The true winner," says Hellstrom, "is the last to finish the race."

As an essay on human fallibility and insect adaptability, The Hellstrom Chronicle seems just a little too facile. The pseudo-documentary framework of the film becomes rickety in places, as Hellstrom (Lawrence Pressman) intones a narration more inflated than informative ("The world was created not with the sweetness of love but the violence of rape"). It is rather as a visual experience that the film succeeds so supremely well.

Walon Green, who directed the picture and shot a good portion of the photography as well, used microlenses and extreme slow motion to get awesome footage of mayflies living out their brief lives, of termites inside their intricate mound fashioned from mud and saliva, of a locust plague in Ethiopia, of a single drop of water killing an insect with its impact. Perhaps the most memorable sequence shows African driver ants. These sightless creatures instinctively use their bodies to form a carriage for their obese queen, and defend her by hurling themselves against attackers with suicidal ferocity. The viewer is brought so deeply into all this that after a few minutes the film begins to take on a surprising immediacy. Like all good science fiction, The Hellstrom Chronicle suggests an alternate reality, then surrounds you with it, inducing a weird sense of disorientation. Despite the melodramatic Dr. Hellstrom, it is a trip much worth taking.

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