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This is a run-of-the-mill nature porn movie. By porn, I don't mean sex. I mean gratuitous images of (for example) thousands of birds together, or hundreds of walruses, or a giant waterfall or iceberg. Several of the shots in the film seem to exist solely to make their way into the trailer, to get people into theatres to see it for all of ten seconds before it disappears never to be seen again for the rest of the film.
There is almost no plot in this film. Told to expect a story of three animal families, "better than March of the Penguins", the movie simply doesn't deliver. The blame rests in three key areas: (1) the writers who gave James Earl Jones some of the worst lines to narrate in nature film history, (2) the music team who over-dramatized everything to tell you what you should be feeling, even when the film fails to motivate, and lastly but most importantly (3) the editors who had the story jump from place to place with no rhyme or reason, no continuity, no flow, sucking the life out of the entire film -- a film about life. When we got to the whales halfway through the film, I sunk back in my seat with dread, hoping against hope that the film was more than halfway through, and that I'd be able to survive the long endurance test along with the animals on screen.
There was also almost no science in the film at all. They attributed hot and cold (all of it, not just the seasons) solely to the Earth's tilt, ignoring the fact that we'd have even greater extremes from location to location if there was no tilt because the poles would never warm. And it would be worst if we had no rotation (relative to revolution) like Mercury, because half the planet would bake and the other half would freeze. Then near the end they used the phrase "humans and animals", as if humans are not animals, somehow exempt from the laws of nature. So much for science.
I must credit the camera work, however, and again that is why I call this nature porn. Everything from super-slow-motion to what appears to be a finely-tuned mechanically-controlled time-lapse photography, was put to use to provide some (and I caution, only "some") stunning moments that do raise the bar compared to other nature films. That said, I am not convinced that it was all nature on the screen. Some of the shots showing the great watering hole in Africa, as it changed from season to season seemed like CGI to me. A director might have expected such suspicion and built in other shots to demonstrate that it's all natural, but they didn't do that.
For a film about Earth, I had expected a lot more of Earth to be shown. What we saw was pristine. We had to take the narrator's word for it that some species are at risk due to climate changes. They didn't show us evidence of it. They didn't show us Alberta's poisonous tailing ponds visible from space. They didn't show us the great Pacific trash whorl. They didn't show us a nighttime picture of human light pollution around the planet. These are as much Earth as anything else. Why cover it up for a feel-good whitewash?
My last criticism of the content is of predation. Any time a predator was shown on the screen actually hunting prey, the music turned almost into that Mt Doom scene from Lord of the Rings, with the predator portrayed as some kind of Sauron ultimate-evil character. But predators aren't evil. They perform a necessary service, ensuring that the best members of the prey species survive. We are predators ourselves. Any time the predator caught the prey, we immediately cut away to something else, to sort of pretend that death and eating don't really happen. The final insult was the "dad" polar bear being left to die after he dared to try to eat. "Bad bear! Bad!", you can almost hear them say.
On to the presentation itself. My theatre may be in part to blame for this, but maybe not. I had expected to see something with greater clarity than I could see on my own HDTV LCD at home. But the picture was blurry, and was presented in the same 16:9 ratio I could get at home, instead of the wider ratio many films come in these days. And during one action-packed scene near the end, the film (I can't imagine this happening digitally, from how it looked) was damaged, and we lost several of the colors, eventually blacking out completely. That repeated about three times.
If they actually do plant a tree on my behalf, it will have been worth it. But how will I know?


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