Our Planet

A painfully beautiful eight-hour experience, bewitching in its loveliness and diversity even as it agitates, relentlessly, for human action against climate change.

Gently sounds the global-warming alarm bell while hypnotically guiding us from the skyscraper-size Arctic ice caps to the cruel hunting grounds of the Serengeti to the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean's midnight zone. [5/12 Apr 2019, p.89]

It’s awe-inspiring and easy on the eyes. ... Images used not just for the emotional gee-whiz factor but for dry commentary and damning visual irony. And it all builds to a series-ending sequence — I’m not used to saying “spoiler alert” for nature films, but I feel I should here — that I suspect will haunt me for a long time.

Our Planet offers all the stunning imagery you’ve come to expect from these documentarians, but its attitude may surprise you. Individual entries feel a little less memorable because of it. The light, comic touches that made for lovely little moments in “Planet Earth” are overshadowed, if not spoiled entirely, by the traumatic lessons put front and center.

Socially responsible nature programming that retains all its beauty – we have at last, and at least, come to this.

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.

Every time Attenborough pivots from a pleasant description of how some animals live and love in the wild to how they’re living on borrowed time, it’s a jarring transition as excruciating as it is refreshing.

It is at times a touch whistlestop and it lacks the precise focus we saw in say Dynasties or Blue Planet II: one moment we're on the Peruvian coast, then we're whisked to the Serengeti then to the boreal forest of North America and polar bears in the Arctic with their underweight cubs until it feels at times like a compilation album.