In the Animal Kingdom, the Wild Bunch Rules | NY.TIMES
Review done by New York Times
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Nature often looks better at a distance. “Planet Earth,” an 11-part mother of all nature series to be shown on the Discovery Channel for five consecutive Sundays, beginning tomorrow night, understands this truth. The BBC, which produced the series with Discovery, used helicopters, long lenses and all manner of cutting-edge film techniques to bring us the photographic spoils of a five-year global odyssey.
Often the filmmakers show Earth in the most flattering light. In Antarctica “the cliff tops are stained pink,” the narrator Sigourney Weaver says, “with the droppings of tens of thousands of nesting penguins.”
Seen from afar, the droppings look lovely. But “Planet Earth” does not always see waste matter through rose-tinted lenses. Close-ups can be equally dramatic.
In a cave in Borneo the camera ranges across what appears to be a moving mountain. This, Ms. Weaver explains, is a 300-foot-high mound of bat droppings, “its surface carpeted with hundreds of thousands of cockroaches.” One would have been enough.
The cockroaches eat the droppings. Occasionally something bigger drops — a bat, say — and the cockroaches eat that too. This brings us to the last element of the trinity of nature shows: beauty, repulsiveness and bloody slaughter.
“Pole to Pole,” the first of the series’s hourlong episodes, is a scan of the planet, a précis of things to come. It includes serious evidence that the natural world, however wounded by global warming, continues to be red in tooth and claw. A wolf captures a caribou; a snow leopard (the species is rarely seen) eats a deer; and a seal falls prey to a shark.
It’s a jungle out there — except when it’s a desert. Early on, a tired, thirsty elephant calf trudges alone through the Kalahari Desert, following its mother’s tracks — in the wrong direction.
The elephant is going to die, but we don’t see that on “Planet Earth,” just as we don’t see a wounded polar bear expire, although we know it will. This series skillfully takes us to the brink of heartbreak and then pulls way back — letting us relax and revel in long shots of caribou migrating across the Canadian tundra — or hones in on a cute family of kangaroos licking their skinny forearms to cool off in the 120-degree heat.
The severest climates and most monotonous landscapes on Earth seem to produce the cuddliest animals. Polar bears, seals and penguins populate the poles; kangaroos, big-eared foxes and long-lashed dromedaries enliven the desert. It is as if nature evolved to accommodate a nature show.
The planet, of course, is changing faster than its inhabitants’ ability to keep up with it, and that sad fact colors many of the episodes. As the polar ice cap shrinks, polar bears must swim farther than ever for food. This leads to the aforementioned bear’s quixotic 60-mile voyage to find dinner: in this case, an ill-judged attack on a walrus herd.
Among this series’s many rare feats is that it often encourages you to root for the predator rather than the prey: fitting at a time when the planet itself seems as vulnerable as a newly hatched penguin.Read full review
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