The Creatures That Ate Hawaii

From the vantage point of 3,000 feet in the air in a helicopter, the island of Kauai looks relatively undisturbed, a paradise of cascading waterfalls and majestically ridged mountains blanketed in mist.

But as the helicopter flies in closer to the top of one of the ridges, there is a slight movement in the verdant landscape beneath, and a pack of feral goats, led by a fat billy, suddenly come into view.

“We got ‘em in sight,” radioes the pilot to an adjacent chopper, which quickly zooms in to afford the cameraman in the passenger seat a better shot as the goats scatter wildly over rocks, nearly plunging over the sheer walls in their panic to escape. Hugging a cliff to get near a heaving billy trapped in a ravine, the choppers seem perilously close to smashing into the mountain--or into each other. But two of the passengers--documentary filmmakers Bill and Grace Niska Atkins--appear oblivious to the danger.

“It wasn’t frightening,” Grace Niska said later on terra firma at the Honolulu home she shares with her husband. “Sitting in an editing room with dull material. Now that’s scary!”

The feral goat sequence was shot last fall for the Atkins’ “Hawaii: Strangers in Paradise,” this week’s “National Geographic Television Special” airing on PBS. “Strangers in Paradise” provides some compelling and beautiful footage for a film on a subject that does not seem to lend itself to either drama or suspense.

In the film, the “strangers” are the island invaders who, beginning 2,000 years ago, set into motion the nearly irreversible processes that have turned Hawaii into an ecological disaster area. The state accounts for more than 70% of the nation’s extinctions of indigenous species.

The documentary shows how man is moving to reverse the devastation in a host of surprising ways. Certainly a worthy subject, but hardly the stuff that could seduce the average viewer away from their favorite game show or sitcom. How then do documentarians today make what amounts to a science class viable for television?

“You have to reach the audience through emotion first,” said Paul Atkins, who photographs and directs the documentaries he co-produces with his wife. “You have to sneak in the information beneath the thrills and excitement that you generate.”

Curiously, Atkins maintained that the dramatic style of the couple’s documentaries, including “Islands of the Fire Goddess,” has been influenced by such old movies as “The Thing,” the ‘50s Hollywood sci-fi flick that sent many youngsters cowering under their beds. While growing up in Mobile, Ala., Atkins had a fascination with science-fiction and horror films, particularly those with sea creatures.

He often badgered his older brother to tell him scary stories, and now Thomas Atkins writes the copy for his documentaries, included this one narrated by actor F. Murray Abraham.

“In a documentary like this it helps if you have a character like the carnivorous caterpillar,” he said, “and a 600mm lens with a doubler.”

Indeed, magnified to that degree, the caterpillar, along with another character, the Hawaiian wolf-spider, looks like something out of a Ridley Scott movie. In the documentary, their fights with their prey compare to the big-game kills that are a perennial favorite of the wildlife documentary. And, as the camera zooms in on a nighttime shot of the feral pig (“vermin-on-the-hoof”), the film’s soundtrack throbs with ominous chords signaling the arrival of jaws of a different sort.

Yet as dramatically effective as these techniques might be, one wonders if there isn’t a danger of trivializing the subject matter or even distorting it, particularly in the case of the dramatic re-creations, which are also part of the film.

Said Grace Niska, who was trained as a biologist before turning filmmaker, “You have to walk a thin line in not getting too bogged down on detail and boring your audience and yet still be accurate.”

Using dramatic re-creations is tricky, Niska said. The challenge is how to make them look convincing without being hokey or self-conscious. In one scene, for example, life in a Polynesian village is re-created at just about the time when the first European colonists arrive in 1778. From there, it’s a quick jump to contemporary island culture: traffic jams, neon--and a growing and activist conservation movement.

“With the juxtaposition, we wanted to make one of the central points of the documentary,” said Atkins. “That is, the irony that the human intrusion that destroyed so many has left so many others dependent on humans for their survival.”

“Hawaii: Strangers in Paradise” airs Wednesday at 7 p.m. on KVCR and at 8 p.m. on KCET and KPBS.