From the poetic underwater images to the bird’s eye view of Mount Everest, the cinematography in Earth is spellbinding. Its brilliance can’t be overstated: it’s almost as if you’ve never seen the planet from this angle before. But the real achievement of Earth – billing itself as the most expensive documentary ever made – is the way that it gets its green message across without preaching.
Narrated by a soothing Patrick Stewart (Star Trek: The Next Generation, X-Men), this big screen version of the BBC series Planet Earth (minus David Attenborough) sweeps from The Arctic Circle right across the world to illuminate the planet’s annual journey through the seasons – and how climate change screws up that delicate cycle. The film’s stars are the animals, with baboons, caribous, whales and an avian cast of thousands. The early scenes of polar bear cubs taking their first steps are especially magical. In other sequences, the doco almost becomes a thriller, with night footage of elephants and lions at an African watering hole, where an uneasy daylight truce is broken in the darkness. There are scenes where predators catch their prey, but we’re spared the bloody details, making this safe cinema for young children. What is scary, though, is the film’s message. The commentary is loaded with facts but not overburdened with figures. So when you’re hit with a statistic, it really resonates.
Less emotive than Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Earth is both exquisitely beautiful and profoundly shocking. Transitions from one subject to the next are sometimes uneven, and the generic soundtrack can be intrusive, but this is worth every cent of its cool $US45 million price tag. Earth has the capacity to shake the viewer out of climate complacency.
Benefiting immensely from a huge budget – one of the largest ever for a documentary – Earth is visually stunning and emotionally moving, and rates as a truly singular experience.
Filmink 4.5/5
