Nap. Kill. Eat. Life Is Good For the King of the Beasts

It's good to be the king. You lie around all day. You have two beautiful blond wives, much younger. They do all the work. When they take too long, you cuff them away and chow down on nice chunks of meat served rare. Hmmm, then it's time for (yawn) nap No. 4. If a new gal comes into town, you can take her in. The wives may howl, but that's too bad. What are they going to do, find another king?

That's pretty much the lifestyle documented in "Lions 3D: Roar of the Kalahari," which debuts today at the Imax theater at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. A question, professor: How do I get a job as a lion king?

But, of course, uneasy lies the head that wears the mane. Our hero, magnificent, scarred, immense, sagacious, indolent, arrogant, decadent, all those attributes to which men secretly or not so secretly aspire, finds himself challenged. Bah. Some punk kid thinks he has what it takes to be the king. Well, Junior, let's see what you got. We'll meet by moonlight, and may the best and baddest cat win.

The 40-minute movie plays at 66 feet by 90 feet in 3-D; it's not a new film, but it has been digitally improved, boosted to the giant Imax screen format and somehow magically three-dimensionalized. So it's not merely a case of being there, it's a case of being a lion. You're an honorary member of the pride. You are among them; you live, snooze, swat flies and springboks and watch the inevitable changing of the guard with both melancholy and inevitability in the confines of a single water hole out on the plains of Botswana. Old goes out, new comes in, youth wins out, same as it ever was, in any office, army, clan, gaggle or sorority on Earth.

One can be thankful that the director, Tim Liversedge (of National Geographic), never gives in to out-of-control anthropomorphism, even if the "replacement drama" may be a scenario imposed by Western minds. Still, our hero is simply "the old lion"; his two mates are simply his females, not his "wives"; the usurper is merely a "young lion"; nobody ever sings "Hakuna Matata"; no meerkats dance. Also, no one cleans the feces-crusted prairie that these big cats and their prey occupy, and no one censors the frequent moments of death when the lionesses, who do the daily hunting, take down this or that springbok.

The movie doesn't glory in the kill, it merely acknowledges it as one part of the natural cycle when every two days or so, one of les gals terminates a fleeing springbok. Liversedge gives us the violence and grace of the kill -- think of a 240-pound linebacker, faster than lightning, meaner than war, blindsiding a 180-pound wide receiver who's wide open after receiving the ball -- but he doesn't fetishize it. We see the animal taken, its neck snapped, the floppiness that signals death spread through its limbs, but then he averts the camera so that rending of carcass into meat is not emphasized.

Indeed, a different image of nature than Tennyson's emerges. It's rarely "red in tooth and claw," it's mostly just sitting around. The Kalahari Desert looks like one of those malls where old people come to park on benches because they have no place else to go anymore. Can't someone organize a mah-jongg tournament? The general sensibility isn't savage competition but genial indifference. Lions and springboks (in the thousands) occupy the same space. Amazingly to eyes like mine, jaded by Western mythologically enhanced lion imagery, what one sees is not a royal hierarchy but a kind of weird sense of living and letting live. The lions walk among their prey, who in turn pay them no heed. At some level the antelope realize that the statistics favor them; they accelerate faster than the lionesses, turn more sharply; they realize they probably won't be the one in a thousand that dies and so there's no need to live in an excited stage. Once in a while, one of the lions feeds, but it's no big deal. And in seconds after the spasm of bloodletting, the herd has drifted back and indolently surrounds the lioness that's tearing everybody's favorite cousin to shreds.

A note on the sound: It's fabulous. Also newly digitized, it has amazing specificity. If you've ever spent a night on the African plains, you know it's like the radio of zoology, as all the creatures seem to find voice and join the punditry. This fellow says that, and an opposing species's representative finds it ridiculous and raises an adroit rejoinder. It's like "The McLaughlin Group" for the animals, and the film's soundtrack captures the eerie eloquence brilliantly.

Lions 3D: Roar of the Kalahari (40 minutes, at the National Museum of Natural History's Samuel C. Johnson Imax Theater) is not rated; it depicts animal violence.