TV Reviews
'Planet Earth,' as compelling as it gets
By Andrew Lyons
Mar 23, 2007, 08:52

This was not lost on the creators of “Planet Earth.” They knew they had to come up with something special after five years of filming on 200 locations with some 71 camera people and spending oodles of money.

“Planet Earth” is that something special.

The 11-part behemoth, which debuts on Sunday on the Discovery Channel and airs over the next five weeks, is first a work of incredible visuals, but what makes this miniseries so impressive is its storytelling. No matter how striking the scenery is in a documentary, it’s always the narrative that holds viewers, and in “Planet Earth” there are dozens of compelling narratives woven through.

Each episode of “Earth” is assigned a theme, like “Ice Worlds” or “Jungles.” The first, entitled “Pole to Pole,” is an introduction to all the parts that will follow, traveling from North to South and exploring everything from polar bears to African elephants.

In capturing the lives of bears, the filmmakers go well beyond “Wild Kingdom" fare, planting their multiple cameras on one bear from the first moment she pokes her head out of the snow after months of hibernation and then becoming her constant companion as she and her baby cubs take their first steps together on their trek to reach the sea ice before it breaks and melts. If they are too slow, too late, they will starve, and the filmmakers turn their saga into a compelling race against time.

We see a herd of elephants, mothers and their babies, push on against a sand storm to the safety of the tree line. We follow one pair as they battle the blinding winds, and after the storm we see they’ve made it to safety.

But another baby elephant has gotten lost. She's following her mother’s tracks but in the wrong direction, back into the desert. The helicopter-mounted camera pulls back to reveal the little calf walking slowly into a dry wasteland. No words are needed to convey nature’s cruelty.

The series repeats this pattern: introducing a world and its inhabitants, focusing on an individual or family, getting to know them, then filming them as they face threats both environmental and predatory.

Each species is captured in such fascinating detail and each creature’s journey is so specific that their stories never bore. The visuals, all shot in high definition, are so crisp, nearly tactile. One super-slo-mo shot of a great white shark jumping out of the ocean to snag an escaping seal is beyond stunning, as the shark floats, seeming almost to fly, in mid-air.

The stories themselves are magnets for empathy. The sight of penguins creating a huge circle to protect their eggs from the freezing Antarctic winter induces shivers. Anxiety mounts as a caribou calf tries to outrun a hungry wolf during a life-and-death chase.  

The temptation for animal documentaries is to go for the sensational. Almost everything in “Planet Earth” is done with subtlety and taste. The camera never lingers on death. The music melds perfectly with the images. And Sigourney Weaver’s narration is informative and rarely intrusive.

There is but one real criticism. The filmmakers are a little too self-congratulatory. We are told over and over that this or that image has never been captured before or how a certain cameraman waited 45 days to get that one compelling shot. We are impressed, of course, by the wealth of the experiences, but reminding us of that wealth repeatedly is a bit gauche.

But if that’s the worst thing that can be said about “Planet Earth,” and it is, then it should do pretty well. It deserves to.