TV Reviews : ‘The March’ Stumbles Despite Strong Premise

The current sight of angry gays marching through the streets of L.A. nearly pales beside the imagined sight of hundreds of thousands of starving Africans marching across the desert to Europe in “The March” (an A&E; cable TV movie airing Sunday at 9 p.m.).

Or so it should. Despite all the talk of teeming masses in the movie, there are at most hundreds of extras visible in any given shot--which is not the biggest problem in this BBC production. The plot sounds like the premise for a modern “Lawrence of Arabia”-style topical adventure, but skimps on spectacle and just gets bogged down in pointless circles of political allegory and theory.

The telepicture’s idea is a good one: Famine meets the future a few years down the road, as the imbalance in the world’s resources gets still more lopsided, and the have-nots get ticked. In the not-so-distant years to come, the refugee camps of Southern Sudan are overrun with a hundred million people, and one man, multilingual Isa El-Madhi (Malick Bowens), decides to lead an improbable protest march all the way to Paris--to throw the reality of hunger in Europeans’ overstuffed white faces. Their message: If we must die, “watch us die.”

It sounds like powerful stuff. And initially, at least, it gives us Western fat cats plenty to guiltily chew on. But the script by William Nicholson (“Shadowlands”) mostly just sticks the simplest opposing arguments about the nature of hunger and global responsibility in the mouths of its Africans and Europeans, making both sides sound naive and never staking out a realistic centrist position itself.