"Our Planet" W. David Attenborough - "The Biggest, Nicest Snuff Film Ever Made"
Our Planet is the biggest, nicest snuff film ever made. The mass murder it records has been in progress for at least 60 years, probably longer. The victims are the Earth’s flora and fauna and the complex ecosystems they inhabit. Eventually, the list of casualties will include the same species that produced the high-tech moviemaking equipment that allowed filmmakers to capture razor-sharp 4K digital video imagery of jungles, glaciers, and veldts, and the industrial technology that enabled strip-mining, mountaintop removal, clear-cutting, chemical pollution, and the manufacture of nonbiodegradable plastic that’s currently destroying coral reefs and choking aquatic life to death.
Legendary broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough, now 92, narrates this eight-part series, which is overseen by Alastair Fothergill, the filmmaker behind The Blue Planet, Planet Earth, Earth, and a series of stand-alone wildlife documentaries for Disney. Every time-honored cliche of the TV nature documentary is served with a smile, from the way Our Planet fixates on a majestic/beautiful/cute species as a means of luring you into a wider discussion of environmental issues (for instance, caribou struggling to survive in the increasingly temperate Arctic, or flamingoes forced to migrate to a desert), to Attenborough’s grandpa-tells-a-bedtime-story narration, to the Mickey-Mousing score by Steven Price (Gravity), whose cue sheets could bear titles like “Requiem for a Walrus” and “Mambo Orangutano” and “Jewish Wedding of the Leaf-Cutter Ants.”
It’s the stylistic ordinariness of the production that ultimately makes it such a punishing viewing experience. Much of the series is built around the rope-a-dope maneuver of drawing you into the stories of individual animals through blatantly anthropomorphized filmmaking and narration (one of the orangutans is even identified as “Louie”), then dropping the expected, awful news that they’re being wiped out by poachers, pollution, population sprawl, and climate change. There’s always a shred of hope nestled somewhere — even if it’s as thin as Attenborough working a variation of “if it’s not too late” into the end of a summation of why the ice caps are melting and the rainforest is being denuded, or periodically repeating the address of the documentary’s website and encouraging viewers to visit it and learn how to save Our Planet. The series strives to be as little-kid friendly as possible. It occasionally shows animals suffering, but only briefly, and I don’t believe it ever depicts predators killing prey, even after having gone to great lengths to reassure us that just because a wolf kills a caribou doesn’t make it a bad doggie. But none of this is enough to quell the feeling that humans have let greed, cruelty, and indifference run wild for far too long.
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“What we do in the next 20 years will determine the future for all life on Earth,” Attenborough tells us at the end of part one. But the series doesn’t get into many specifics, whether because the filmmakers wanted to use the series for spectacle and save the action memos for the website, or simply because, on some level, they fear that the next two decades will be about damage control. The facts and figures cited here — as well as the spectacular, worldless montages of environmental decay, such as the section depicting the collapse of melting glaciers — make it seem as if we all missed the cutoff point for preventing full-on environmental catastrophe, and must now focus on slowing it.
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https://www.vulture.com/2019/04/our-planet-on-netflix-review.html
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