Do you find yourself spending too much time in the video store, never quite sure which video to rent? With as much action as Jurassic Park, more laughs than a Jim Carrey movie, and as much sex (and more nudity) than Showgirls, Miramax’s microcosmos is unquestionably the perfect film to satisfy anyone’s appetite. So why haven’t you heard more about it? As surprising as it might sound, microcosmos manages to combine all these elements in a refreshingly new film that improves on the style and content of the standard documentary.

Capturing the everyday miracles and unbelievable activities of insects you’re likely to find in your own backyard, microcosmos is a feast for the eyes and imagination. Fifteen years of research and three years of filming by French biologists Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou transformed this project into the butterfly of a film that it is.

So why should you see microcosmos instead of tuning in to a nature program on cable television? microcosmos is more than a documentary. Instead of telling you what is happening, it shows you with amazing footage. The film begins and ends with a short narration by Kristin Scott Thomas, though there are no human voices during the rest of the film. Without an annoying narrator describing everything, you are immersed in a world that we normally tend to overlook. As you watch, you’ll be amazed by how self-explanatory everything is and how much you remember from elementary school science lessons.

Like Walt Disney’s Fantasia, microcosmos combines amazing sights with an appropriate musical score. Rather than molding the action to fit the piece, the music was conducted for the film. Blending the sounds of the insects with music, the soundtrack makes scenes come alive. The music heightens the drama as two stag beetles clash in combat, while pointing out how delicate the mating process is for a pair of snails.

With life spans of no more than a few weeks, insects must make the most of their time. microcosmos unveils a day in the lives of more than two dozen different insects as they do their best to collect food, win a mate, escape peril, and survive every type of weather. The filmmakers describe their film as “a sort of symbolic day, twenty-four hours treated as if it were a whole year in the life of a man, with all the very intense moments affecting it.”

Many of the fascinating activities in microcosmos were carefully orchestrated and filmed, rather than caught by accident. The filmmakers knew how the insects would behave, though the tiny actors sometimes needed a little prodding to act for the camera. For instance, the directors gave the sacred beetle the conditions it needed to make a pill of its droppings, which paid off in one of the movie’s funniest scenes. The sacred beetle is hilariously determined as it rolls the ball along the ground, frequently tripping and losing control but never giving up.

If you have a magnifying glass and a lot of patience, you might be able to see most of the activities shown in microcosmos. However, you’d probably never see the rare Argyronet spider, no matter how hard you looked. One of the many insects included in the film, the spider spins an underwater web and pulls air bubbles from the surface to make a submarine dining room. Equally fascinating is a ring of caterpillars who blindly follow one another in an endless circle. In another of the movie’s most memorable sequences, a predatory pheasant seems intimidating even to the audience as the relatively huge beast tries to make a meal out of a swarm of ants.

“In microcosmos, we insisted on showing the small failures of life, the troubles, all the small problems that can happen. And it’s well known that it’s always fun to see that other people are in trouble,” the filmmakers explained. What microcosmos doesn’t show us is much of the commonplace carnage found in the insect world. With scenes like a group of ants collecting the sweet liquid that gnats produce, we get the impression that these insects aren’t really as violent as we learned. The footage Nuridsany and Pérennou chose to include helps us to see the insects for their social habits and makes them seem almost human.

By the end of the film, we are so immersed in the insect world that we are left wanting to see more. As a new day begins, the camera slowly pans out and away from the hidden universe that it has revealed. Kristin Scott Thomas begins speaking again and we know the show is over. In an hour and a half, we have seen so much, yet our imaginations have only been awakened. Now it’s time to return to the world we know.