The battle of the sexes was never this brutal. In National Geographic's Hidden World of the Bengal Tiger, you'll watch from atop an elephant's back as Lakshmi, a mother tiger, tends to her young in the face of the grave danger posed by her fiercest enemy: a male tiger. The forest is cool, green, and beautiful, and thanks to exceptional cinematography, the viewer seems to melt into the trees as Lakshmi hunts and fends off the stalker. The filmmakers' sympathy with their subjects is clear and inevitably the viewer is drawn into the drama of survival in the wild, even the grim beauty of the tiger's kills. Despite this sympathy, there is little temptation to humanize these animals--they aren't people but distant cousins at best, and their feelings and actions are profoundly distinct from our own. These differences give us much to learn from, and National Geographic presents unprecedented insight into the Hidden World of the Bengal Tiger. --Rob Lightner |
