Absolutely beautiful (problematic with regards to politics)

The box set of the much touted Planet Earth is broken into three DVDs: Disk 1: “Pole to Pole,” “Mountains,” and “Fresh Water;” Disk 2: “Caves,” Deserts,” “Ice Worlds;” Disk 3: “Great Plains,” “Jungles,” “Shallow Seas;” Disk 4: “Seasonal Forests,” and “Ocean Deep.” The fifth disk is going to cause some problems—more on that in its place: “Saving Species,” “Into the Wilderness,” and “Living Together.”

In the British version (the one I bought) has David Attenborough as narrator (apparently the American version uses Sigourney Weaver). He walks through each of the almost 15 hours of footage and is, literally the only voice you hear in the episodes. There are “diaries” that follow each chapter explaining the most difficult portions of each chapter to film—these run from 5 to 10 minutes. Mr. Attenborough narrates these, but the focus is the dialog among the filmmakers and technicians.

The good and the ugly are pretty easy to explain. The bad is going to take some time.

There is no denying that the footage goes beyond all of the standard movie words: SPECTACULAR, BREATHTAKING, UNIQUE, ORIGINAL, MAGNIFICANT and so on. Thanks mostly to a helicopter fitted with a special camera that can zoom to a kilometer and keep a stable image no matter how much the copter may move, the viewer is allowed to see animal movements and environmental happenings from a distance so that it doesn’t noticeably affect at least the animals being filmed. I could go into an episode by episode breakdown but any reader would quit less than halfway through, so I will just focus on the general tone and structure.

Each chapter is not quite 50 minutes long. “Pole to Pole” is a primer of what will be handled more specifically in the chapters to follow.

No human appears in any of the chapters except for caves and seasonal forests; however, they have no speaking parts; they seem to be there for perspective (perspective is all but lacking everywhere else, for instance a lily pad said to be 2 meters in diameter has no reference so it doesn’t look any bigger than a standard lily pad ). The focus is on the atmosphere of the area under inspection and how it presents a setting to the animals specific that biome. Creating the atmosphere for each biome is so high in the WOW factor that I can’t think of anything to say except WOW. Use any word you want, but WOW is the only one that is short, simple, and truly accurate. This is true for the most lush places as well as the most barren. Few of us will see any of these areas except the one we live in, so the filmmakers take great efforts to create a serious beauty. Apart for this, the way each biome is presented with equal measure of beauty so no biome is considered one better than another (there are moments of narrative where this is not true but I cover that below).

Each chapter picks a couple of things to focus on with some oblique references to other relationships in each environment. The ones that stick out most for me are the midge mating that occurs in Lake Malawi. When they grow to the ability to fly, they rise above the water in what looks like light brown smoke pillars. The film show this and show the collapse of these columns as the midges die (like mayflies, they breed and die within moments). They show a snow leopard hunting—this is a very rare cat and seeing it by itself is enough, but seeing its behavior is fantastic. The “Ocean Deep,” the documentary shows how dolphins working together to corral bait fish in such a way that it looks like the bait fish appear like they are reaching critical mass, then the dolphins feed. More than once, we see, from satellite view, the taiga go through a thaw—there is this wide swath of white to green (this was a super serious WOW). There are other such moments of each of these that I use as indicators.

I want to stress this before I get to the warnings, and the explanations of what I see as the “bad.” Watch these films. If you don’t want to hear any of the explanations of the events and so on, that would be fine—the images alone are enough to lift spirits.

Now the ugly. The first half of the “Cave” episode is extremely icky. To be brief, it involves bats, bugs, and droppings--I am not squeamish but this and other similar moments nearly turned my stomach. The second half covers how caves are created and show the formations, many of these are fantastic.

Hunting and feeding are not gross. In fact, this is where I will go from warning to what I find wrong with the documentary. The films favor the preyed—more of them get away than are caught. The predators are not vilified in any way, but they are shown as losers more often than I think is useful. We all eat. What separates us from the animals we watch is that someone else kills the animal before packaging it.

There are some minor flaws and a few major ones in objectivity. First, the film is very northern hemisphere specific. Even in the tropical regions, most of the activity occurs north of the equator. Second, the writers used the word “home” in a selfish way. In the “Season Forest” episode, Mr. Attenborough extols one biome and calls it home—it is as if the BBC only intended the film for Europeans and that it was a hit anywhere else was accidental. The final problem with the objectivity will lead to the problem I think many people will find seriously flawed.

Before I get to this I want to stress that this series is beautiful. The scope alone is enough to impress anyone. Whatever you feel about what I’m going to discuss immediately below, Planet Earth is still worth the time.

The final disk covers habitat and climate issues—fair enough, any modern nature documentary will have to cover this at one point (the main body of work does this with a male polar bear trying to get somewhere to eat and attacking animals it ordinarily would not; once he fails, he lays down and we are told he dies shortly after—this is all due to how soon and how drastically the polar ice melts). The problem isn’t that the documentary covers these issues, it is how.

I can pull out and show my “not knee jerk liberal” card on demand which is why I can analyze the final chapters (remember I said not knee jerk). One liberal question after another are asked and no answer is offered that would be even remotely possible (either in the short or long term). I will give the film kudos for bringing up the population issue, but again in a liberal way: can the planet sustain the number of humans it has let alone 50% more in the coming decades? The consensus is . . . there is none. How do you pick one species or habitat to maintain versus another . . . well . . . we don’t know how or which or whether. Great.

There are two absurd “solutions” that really do need to be covered. One group of experts is collecting DNA from all animals in the hope that they can clone them so they can be reintroduced, or (and get this) take them with us when we begin to settle the moon or Mars. The spokeswoman for this group of zoologists don’t seem to take into consideration that you can get the DNA of a snow leopard, but how are you going to provide a habitat for them? Is a man made habitat outside a zoo something we are able to build? If so, would the leopard survive or become so dominant that they start hunting people as their preferred food.

The second comes from Dr James Lovelock (I reviewed his book The Revenge of Gaia: http://www.epinions.com/content_355641364100). He says two things, one sounds decent the other beyond comprehension. The first is that sustainable growth is not possible that a sustainable retreat would be the only answer that would bring the earth back from the tipping point (he believes we have already well passed that). The second is that the planet is really only capable of holding between half a billion to a billion people max. His opinion can be whatever he likes, but I don’t see why the producers bothered giving him any airtime.

The answer that seems to make the most sense is one that comes with so many problems that you can file it under: great idea, poor execution. The idea is to pay people to keep parks in third world nations from poachers. The second is to pay farmers near threatened areas not to farm part of their land so that the natural order can begin to return. What the documentary shows is that the people in these areas tend to look at the “solution” as a Western solution to a problem the West does not understand. We want Amazonia preserved, but if the folks who live in or amongst it have different ideas, what are we supposed to do? The US brought back the bison despite the fact that they used to be killed en masse—how would Americans at the time reacted if Britain or Canada started to try to impose their ideas on us? Western farmers killed wolves because they wanted to protect their herds of cows and other valuable animals. Again, if someone outside tried to impose an idea like that, what would we do? Considering that we do little to limit our own emissions now, there is no doubt we would have been any more likely at the time to follow those foreign edicts.

The sad thing is that there really is no answer. The attempt at balance (giving people who believe humans have had little or no impact on the global climate) is a poor one both because it shows only extremes and there are not enough of them to offer their potential solutions.

It is very possible that there is no answer. What solution occurs will occur as it always has in the past. If external pressures are great enough, then huge numbers of species will become extinct (humans not excluded), or rapid change intended to bring homeostasis will occur and that could spell almost as much harm to humans as mass extension. Whether we caused the current problem, added to it, or are just unlucky to live at a time of climate shift, we will face one of, or a combination of both of these things.

All of the political crap aside, this is a brilliant film—if you are uninterested in the climate change issue or are hostile to it, then skip the last disk. Apart from that and the first half of the section on caves, I recommend this documentary.