Available on DVD: “The Last Lions”

One of the most urgent and certainly among the most beautifully shot documentaries to come to DVD in recent memory, The Last Lions isn’t just another cute and fuzzy encounter session with a different species. It’s a pulse-quickening, tear-duct milking and outrageously dramatized story about the threats — wildfires, chomping teeth, stampeding hooves and, worst of all, unseen humans — that face a female lion trying to protect her cubs. Here, single motherhood doesn’t mean juggling family, work and PTA meetings: it means parking the tots in the bushes and then trying to take down a water buffalo the size of a jeep.

Alas, the movie’s title is horrifyingly accurate. Conservation groups tend to put the current population of African lions at roughly between 20,000 and 50,000, a staggering decline from the estimated 400,000 that were born and roamed free a half-century ago. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, a global network of environmental groups, has classified lions as vulnerable and indicates that their numbers are only declining. Their future looks grim, even hopeless. (In Kenya, home to Elsa of the popular 1966 movie Born Free, wild lions might be wiped out within one to two decades.) All this makes a well-intentioned movie like The Last Lions, from the husband and wife filmmaking team Dereck and Beverly Joubert, necessary viewing.

It’s perhaps because the stakes are so high for lions — and also maybe because, Al Gore notwithstanding, environmental bad news is as hard a sell at the movies as it is off screen — that the Jouberts decided to personalize this story of survival. Steering clear of the customary talking heads and dire statistics, which might chance audience indifference, they have instead created an empathetic, heart-heavy story about the burdens of parenthood, and hired Jeremy Irons — the voice of the villain in the Disney animation The Lion King — to narrate. In other words, they went the route of March of the Penguins, the improbable hit about emperor penguins toughing it out in Antarctica that was reassuringly narrated by Morgan Freeman.

It soon becomes eyeball-poppingly obvious, though, that the fairly peaceable kingdom of emperor penguins is worlds apart from the tooth-and-claw lives of lions. Forget the ice capades of those tuxedoed, natural-born comedians. Here, in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, just north of South Africa, carnivores battle one another in a drama far wilder and bloodier than any that Marlin Perkins delivered on television on Wild Kingdom. Within the first 20 minutes of The Last Lions one adult lion dies in a ferocious on-screen fight, a battle capped with a shot of flies buzzing on a destroyed eye, and another becomes an off-screen snack for a crocodile. As television fodder like When Animals Attack! proves, death piques human interest in animals as much as "aww" images of playful kittens do.

The central lion in the movie, called Ma di Tau ("mother of lions" in Setswana, a language of Botswana), certainly has an arresting, hard-luck story. First, her old man splits, and then she and her three little ones lose their home in a fire. With nowhere nearby to run to — the nasty people, I mean pride, next door limit her options — she and her cubs move into a marsh surrounded by crocodiles. Hard-wired territorial demands and fast-encroaching humans might be why the family has to move into such a bad neighborhood. But from the absurdly personalized narration purred by Irons — he describes how the story’s beleaguered heroine feels and what she knows — the relocation is just another episode in As the Lions Turn.

It’s one thing to feel compassion for animals and to believe that they have emotions. At certain instances, rather entertainingly, Ma di Tau even seems to be remembering, via a series of flashbacks, moments out of her past. Yet turning animals into humanlike characters denies them their nature and, here at least, also makes for some deeply unpleasant and exploitative interludes. There’s a needlessly protracted sequence between the mother and a wounded cub that’s pure filmmaker sadism and that, in its cutting and framing, makes it seem as if the mother is consciously cruel rather than following her instincts. These techniques, along with the overwrought, heavily editorializing music, help build great narrative tension out of what often looks like separate documented moments in time. You might cry, but you also feel beaten up.

The Last Lions is a worthy, intensive labor of love that took years to shoot and edit, and it’s also more gripping than a lot of recent Hollywood thrillers. Commendably, the Jouberts and National Geographic (its movie division is distributing the documentary) have also established the Big Cats Initiative, an international conservation project to spread the word about endangered cats. Yet by sensationalizing and sentimentalizing a tale of animal life and death, by focusing on one lion family instead of the threats faced by a species, the Jouberts have risked reducing a real catastrophe into a tidy fiction. Then again, is the fault really theirs or of those who pay attention only when a tragedy looks like something they can relate to?