THE EAGLE HUNTRESS (Otto Bell). 87 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (November 4). See Listings. Rating: NNN
The Eagle Huntress takes a great story and turns it into a movie that’s just okay.
For his first feature documentary, Otto Bell travels to Mongolia’s Bayan-Ölgii province to profile Kazakh teen Aisholpan Nurgaiv, the first girl in her family to take up the tradition of hunting with eagles.
Bell’s cameras follow Aisholpan on her quest to capture an eaglet, raise it and train it to hunt, and ultimately to enter Mongolia’s Golden Eagle Festival, where no woman has ever competed before.
It’s a stirring tale, and Bell captures Aisholpan’s determination and spirit with some thrilling aerial photography. But he also makes sure that the film plays as dramatically as possible, to the point where it feels like it’s edging out of the documentary form entirely and becoming something like narrative non-fiction.
At least two scenes are clearly staged for Bell’s camera, and I felt the guiding hand of executive producer Morgan Spurlock in certain triumphant beats. (The narration, read by Daisy Ridley, is actually pretty good.)
The result is a movie that works just fine, I suppose certainly an audience accustomed to the current state of reality television won’t object to anything here. But The Eagle Huntress would have been so much better if it trusted its audience to appreciate its story without all the packaging.
