Planet Earth: As You've Never Seen it Before
I wanted to give five stars to the single most amazing documentary I have ever seen. The documentary is Planet Earth, a BBC Warner production, and it includes a clip of a great white shark jumping eight to ten feet out of the water. Eight to ten feet. Like jumping from the water onto a basketball rim. You can see it here: Great White Shark. Take a look at its front fin. This is the front fin of an animal that grows up to twenty feet long and can be 4,400 pounds, according to many people’s favorite source. That’s a big animal. And the front fin is enormous. It must be five feet long. I’m five foot seven. And this fin, along with that powerful body, has propelled that magnificent animal at such great speeds that it has exploded out of the water. That shark is like a cannonball coming out of the cannon. Planet Earth slows the shark’s speed down (a three second clip becomes a forty second clip), almost pausing the shark in mid-air, and that leap is (honest to God) the most ferocious, horrific, amazing thing you’ve ever seen, outside the Paris Hilton Incarceration (PHI).Planet Earth is a five DVD set—we rented it at our local video store; you don’t have to pay its hefty full price—and each second of those five hundred and fifty minutes is worth watching. Planet Earth takes you to different geographic zones on earth (From Pole to Pole, Mountains, Fresh Water, Caves, Deserts, Ice Worlds, Great Plains, Jungles, Shallow Seas, Seasonal Forests, Ocean Deep) and gives you about forty to forty-five minutes with each, followed by a ten or fifteen minute documentary. The first forty or so minutes is composed of a high definition look at each of those zones and the animals within them. So, for instance, the film takes you to Borneo to look at caves, to Antarctica to look at the ice worlds, to Mongolia to visit deserts, and so on—all over the world. You get sneak peeks at Bactrian camels, bison, strange extremophiles that live in atmospheres comprised mostly of sulfur, and so on. You get to see the beautiful, astounding events: Canadian geese on their migration, the swelling of North American cacti, and the constellation of lights created by cave dwelling worms. And, in addition to that, you get to see the crazy, sometimes disgusting and frightening things that make you bite your nails and cringe: two goats butting on a narrow mountain ledge, a pack of lions dragging down an elephant, a hundred meter tall mountain of bat guano that is covered by cockroaches. Yum yum.
At the end of each of the segments, Planet Earth shows a “diary” of what its film crew did to make the segment. For instance, they take you inside a hut with a couple of cameramen who have a polar bear nosing on the window. You get to see a guy on Christmas day, all alone in the Tibetan wilderness, miles away from his wife and kids and carols. He’s hunting for photos of snow leopards, and he hasn’t seen any leopards, so he’s just waiting. For days. The ethos of these photographers is really touching. You feel like you want to be a Planet Earth cameraman, until you see the crew wading knee deep in cockroach covered bat guano or spending ten days beneath the surface of the earth, searching for a bunch of unusual rocks. We all know it’s dark in caves, but don’t forget you’ve got to squeeze through tight corners too, lug around a bunch of heavy, expensive camera equipment, forget about showers and toilets, and ignore the I’m-going-to-go-insane-if-I-can’t-see-the-sun-soon feeling. At that point, the camera crew realizes they won’t see sunlight for the next three days.
But the work pays off. The diaries are almost like a tribute to the services these people have performed, as much as they are a medium of expression for the feelings of the cameramen. The work that Planet Earth does is tremendous. They have respect for the environment, amazing shots of unusual/rare occurrences, and permits to go into places you’ve only dreamed of. Viewed through their camera lens, it’s like the Earth has been reinvented.
So, you can check out an amazing, speedy-to-download, 14 minute, 5 second clip of the high-definition film here: Planet Earth Clip. Also, at the bottom of that webpage, you can see that the three Amazon reviewers on that page gave it 5 stars out of 5 (probably because the film is absolutely incredible) and over two hundred readers found their reviews “helpful”. A couple of the reviewers talked about Sigourney Weaver’s narration of the events, and they had some critical comments on it. We didn’t hear her speak a word. David Attenborough was our narrator, and he has an adorable, refined English accent that carries him through. He’s really excellent. I couldn’t have chosen anyone better. In some ways, his narration makes me think of Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption—the way that his voice only comes in when necessary. He’s only there to explain and elaborate, and he never does so condescendingly. In fact, Attenborough’s voice makes you think of the exact opposite: a teacher who you want to listen to.
Reviewed by David
5 out of 5
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