Earth

If there’s life on Mars or somewhere else in the universe, and the aliens have houses and cities and civilizations and travel agencies, it is likely that they will use Disney’s new documentary film Earth as a promotional travel video for extraterrestrials. Come visit Earth! Check out the exotic animals and the lush jungles and amazing waterfalls! Special rates if you stay Thursday through Monday!

Earth has all the elements you would expect from an expensive BBC / Discovery Channel / Disney nature film collaboration: beautiful scenery, soaring images of beautiful deserts, lush rainforests, animals doing their thing in slo-mo, and so on.

Technically, of course, Earth is well done. All the beautiful images are set to soaring music, and the film is supposed to inspire awe in the majesty of our lonely pale blue dot. There are some amazing sequences, such as a lonely (and doomed) polar bear searching for food, and the first (failed) flights of newborn birds.

As a film, however, Earth loses its footing quickly. You can tell that the filmmakers strained to find and follow a narrative thread-- mostly unsuccessfully. We leap from scene to scene, animal to animal, with little rhyme or reason. One minute we’re following a flock of migratory birds as they try to navigate a mountain range, then we’re watching a time-lapse scene of leaves changing colors with the seasons, then we’re in the deep sea with a mother whale and her calf (of course there are very few adult males—this is Disney, after all, with a tradition of stories involving dead or missing fathers). Maybe the randomness is intended as part of the film’s theme, but I don’t think so.

There are a few minor factual gaffes (the Himalayas are not the highest mountain range on Earth, and may not even be the highest terrestrial mountains) and some dubious claims: Over footage of a cheetah capturing its prey, narrator James Early Jones tries to cushion the death with “This is the circle of life that most of us in our urban lives have lost touch with...”

Really? I didn’t realize that modern urban city dwellers had lost touch with the birth and death cycles. Apparently in the Disney writers’ mythical, rarefied urban world, people have forgotten that animals eat other animals, and that all living things die sooner or later, whether from predator, disease, or accident. I guess us urban dwellers live sheltered lives full of rainbows and unicorns….Good thing Disney is exposing this common myth.

It is also interesting that during the entire film, of all the animals on Earth, the most amazing and powerful animal is never seen: humans. Until the blooper reel-type end credits roll, not a single person is seen. That’s a legitimate filmmaking decision, but seems like a strikingly odd omission if the film’s subject is life on the planet Earth.

Earth is based on an 11-part Discovery Channel program released in 2007, and in fact over half of the film was taken and repackaged from the TV series. As far as documentary nature films go, Earth is solidly mediocre, and nowhere as interesting as films such as Winged Migration or March of the Penguins.