Earth (2007)

If anyone would have told me a few years ago that nature documentaries would attract large cinema audiences I would have probably laughed in their face. March of the Penguins however proved me wrong, and so did Al Gore a year later with his environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Earth covers some of the middle ground between those two movie, and although amazingly beautiful at times I thought it missed the mark somewhat.

It all starts out very promising. We get to see baby polar bears crawl out of their den and see daylight for the very first time. If that doesn’t melt you nothing will. From the North Pole, Earth takes us on a southward journey, following migrating animals down to the South Pole. To win our hearts it takes the familiar approach of focusing on the cubs, calfs and other offspring.

I found the first few segments very interesting. They focussed on animals I knew very little about, and their spectacular surroundings. I watch National Geographic Channel all the time, so seeing a few new faces was nice. Especially when there turns out to be a lot to tell about for instance the Caribou. Unfortunately, once we arrived at the equator, the movie focussed mostly on the regular bunch, like lions, cheetahs, elephants and whales. Even though the images shown were really spectacular I couldn’t help feeling slightly disappointed.

Another thing that bugged me was the balance between the environmental message and simply showing nature’s splendor. I would have liked either a movie that showed me loads of cute critters and let me decide for myself that I wanted to save them, or one that made me feel even worse about the power consumption of my new TV. Earth shows us how polar bears are having a hard time due to global warming, but it’s far less clear on how I could possibly help the elephants in the Kalahari desert. In fact it doesn’t even go into why exactly these animals migrate at all. The same goes for several other animals we see.

In fact, in many cases it’s only because the narrator tells us that the animals are hungry, thirsty or otherwise desperate that a sense of urgency is created. Most of them look, upon first glance, to be doing alright. I highly suspect that a few not-so-endangered species were added in because of their cuddliness only. This doesn’t help the film’s underlying theme, and makes it somewhat of a mixed bag.

Patrick Stewart has years of experience in uttering sentences that include the word “planet”, and he really is a wonderful narrator. A few sentences into the movie I was expecting him to send an away team to the planet’s surface, but that feeling quickly subsided.

Go see this of you’re in the mood for some amazing animal cinematography, but don’t expect it to be a educational as Al Gore’s movie was, or even as in-depth as “March”.

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