A Film Directed by Mike Slee

I recently took a trip to the Kansas Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas, and if you are unaware of that museum and live anywhere in the area, you really need to do yourself a favor and take a trip over there as well. If you go all in and get a day pass, that grants you a film, a planetarium show, the museum and more. We ended up having to make a choice of films to watch, and for us there was a film about blue whales called Blue Whales: Return of the Giants and the topic for today’s review – a film called Amazon Adventure – A True Story of Scientific Discovery. I went into this sight unseen thinking it would just be a nature documentary, but to my surprise it was a 45 minute long short film about the scientist Henry Bates, the man who helped back up Charles Darwin and prove his theories.

“Amazon Adventure tells the epic, true story of Henry Bates, the son of a sock maker, who risked his life in the perilous Amazon in the 1850’s and discovered the “beautiful proof” for the greatest explanation ever put forward for the development of life on earth. Pulled out of school in Leicester at the age of 13 to apprentice in a hosiery factory, Bates loved nature, was an avid beetle collector with an insatiable curiosity and detective-like mind. A voracious reader, he taught himself several languages, taxonomy and was a gifted singer, guitarist and illustrator and by 17, had his first science article published. Motivated by his thirst for more knowledge and unable to be contained by his factory town, Bates set sail with his friend Alfred Wallace, in their early twenties, on the adventure of a lifetime across the ocean to the Amazon rainforest and a burning quest to prove if species change.”

Charles Darwin published his highly controversial book On the Origin of Species to a chilly reception in the scientific community, largely due to religious fervor. Without a convincing specimen proving his theory of how species change, Darwin was under tremendous attack and ridiculed. Little did he know that a fellow scientist working in the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil, Henry Bates, had been cataloguing all manner of interesting creatures and may hold the key to blowing this out of the water once and for all. Not only did Bates help prove evolution via his thousands of newly discovered butterfly species, but the creation of a new theory entirely called Batesian Mimicry.

Bates noticed that he’s see all sorts of weird things in the jungle, such as bird feces that walked, which later turned out to be an insect, flying water droplets that were insects, snakes that were actually caterpillars, and jungle cats that mimicked the sound of small monkeys. He was bewildered by this and had no idea how to explain what he had seen, but used his observations to help his colleagues, such as Darwin.

A story is only as good as the director can shoot something when making a film, and thankfully Mike Slee did an excellent job with Amazon Adventure – A True Story of Scientific Discovery. The acting was pretty good for something like this, and the location shooting in The Amazon was gorgeous. The film was full of intensely detailed 4k shots of animals doing their thing out in the jungle, giving this an almost hybrid nature documentary vibe. The film was even able to do something like show a River rockslide that nearly killed Bates, something I would not have figured would be in the budget for a film like this. One can tell the film did not have a massive budget, but what was produced seemed authentic for a period drama and was peppered with gorgeous shots nonetheless.

I saw this on a digital dome screen, which was not likely the optimal way to watch this due to the curvature of such a format, but with that said, it works well even with that. There were plenty of scenes that, due to the size and curvature, made it seem like the viewer was in the film, something that IMAX films do pretty well at times.

Overall, this was a fine film and I’m glad we randomly chose to watch it. I actually went into this film pretty much knowing nothing about Henry Bates, so this was a VERY educational film. I’m not sure my son enjoyed it too much towards the end when it became much more “talkey”, but the parts filmed in the jungle were very cool and held his attention throughout. These sorts of films, produced to be shown at educational theaters like this, can be a bit hit-or-miss, but this is definitely on the high end of the scale. This alone would be great to be shown on something like National Geographic or Discovery, assuming that’s the sort of shows they even show on those anymore (I don’t have cable). If you see this come into your local science museum or educational center, I’d highly recommend it!