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Forget the grunting, helmet-butting, body-slamming monsters of the National Football League. Instead, in "Join the Migration,'' we see superstar football players, clearly on their summer vacations, drop everything -- e.g., a caught fish, a lawnmower -- to head, in unison, back to training camp. Like exotic birds flying south, they seem instinctively to sense the siren song of the pre-season.

The spot, the latest 60-second Reebok ad from mcgarrybowen, is not only lush looking and artfully cut, but cosmically scored. The music startled me out of a doze one night mid-Colbert Report; I had to look up and see what brand was being promoted against such a haunting female soundtrack.

While the visuals are fluid and hypnotic enough to match the music, the tone implies more than just a play on gender. The idea doesn't devolve into the usual juxtaposition of male/female ad clichés (if I have to see one more tough guy getting his chest waxed...); it's almost as if we're seeing the players in a higher state of humanity.

At the same time, it's an awfully high-concept way to sell the NFL Equipment Speedwick Tee, the official pre-season training shirt (an "antimicrobial moisture-wicking shirt with a unique, soft cotton hand"), which is the spot's supposed purpose. After all that lushness, the title card at the end with the Tee info seems like an afterthought. (It would be smart, though, to follow up this big, anthem-like spot with some product-specific ones, because the shirt looks great.)

The spot opens on Chad Johnson -- the showboat famous for touchdown stunts like giving the ball CPR -- chilling at a resort pool. The tropical breeze seems to carry a signal that his fellow players (Eli and Peyton Manning included) pick up on. Matt Hasselbeck, for instance, is in Seattle fishing, and he, like the others, leaves to march towards his calling. (Johnson is shown in Los Angeles hitchhiking, which could be seen as an inside joke alluding to whether or not he is leaving his team.)

In the wrong hands, this could have come off as scary and zombie-like. Certainly, we've seen groups of comatose-looking people marching in ads before. In a Saturn spot, they were a metaphor for a car. In a Monster spot, they had to shield themselves from the rising sun because they couldn't stand their jobs. (I loved the Monster spot that had the guy with the giant legs powering his entire town by riding a bicycle. No one wants to feel part of the herd.)

But the idea of migration works on several levels. The players migrate back to football training and, ostensibly after seeing advertising like this, consumers will migrate away from Nike. And aided by the music, it helps to convey a deep, almost mystical understanding of the draw of the game.

The hypnotic visuals come from director Janusz Kaminski, who as a cinematographer won Oscars for his work on Saving Private Ryan and Jerry McGuire. More relevant to the unexpected emotional feeling conjured up here is the cinematography he did for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, one of the most visually compelling films ever made.

The music, "Train Song,'' by a folk singer with the all-time-great name of Vashti Bunyan (who was first discovered in 1965 and is making a comeback), really moves each edit along.

The spot also brings together no less than 20 NFL stars. And it does so in an exciting, show-offy way that's like the pro-football version of a Vanity Fair Hollywood cover.

After all that major entertainment (including a dramatic shot of Eli Manning leading the Reebok men across the Brooklyn Bridge), the addendum about the sweatproof shirt makes for an awkward coda -- another reminder that for the last 20 years Reebok has been a brand in search of a single, unified advertising strategy.

(Remember when Reebok was briefly on the image map fighting Nike, off the field, with "Terry Tate, Office Linebacker?'' Its joke was that Tate used the same amount of testosterone dealing with expense reports and copy machines as he did when playing on the gridiron. For whatever reason, though, Tate disappeared after two seasons.)

By itself, this latest spot won't solve two decades of incoherent patchwork marketing. At least it's consistent with "Your move,'' the tagline the agency introduced last year as a more individualistic "Just do it" (the jury's still out on whether the new tagline is succeeding).

While Reebok indeed has a long way to go in terms of achieving the brilliant consistency of Nike's messaging, as a one-off commercial, "Join the Migration" is a refreshing call to arms.