by Bernard Unti
Not an asteroid disaster flick. Not an alien invasion story. Not a post-nuclear apocalyptic tale. Instead, just in time for Earth Day 2009 comes a first-run movie starring—that’s right—Earth itself! The planet we live on, with thousands of other species.
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| Earth draws on sequences from the acclaimed 2006 BBC/Discovery/NHK series Planet Earth. © BBC |
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Earth, an ambitious effort involving German, British, and American partners, including Discovery and Disneynature, combines magnificent aerial, close-up, and time-lapse cinematography with an understated ecological message. It’s a dizzying visual journey through our planet’s extraordinary biodiversity.
Images Tell the Story
The film, which attracted large audiences when released last year in England, France, Germany, Japan and other nations, centers on the fate of wildlife species spread across the whole world. With its spectacular images, captured with high-definition cameras, Earth is an eyeful. Moreover, its poignant rendering of maternal bonding in animals and its delicate handling of predation struggles ensure a G rating that should garner Earth a wide audience in the United States.
Drawing on sequences from the acclaimed 2006 BBC/Discovery/NHK series Planet Earth, Earth follows the migration of three sets of parents and offspring—polar bears at the North Pole, elephants in the Kalahari Desert, and humpback whales en route from the tropics to Antarctica.
Shifting from one of these odysseys to the next, over a full calendar year, Earth conveys the marvel, efficiency, and—at times—the fragility, of our planet’s ecosystems. Each species’ narrative arc exemplifies the broader threat of climate change to the world’s nonhuman residents and their habitats.
There is a large supporting cast of species in Earth, including mandarin ducks, arctic wolves, caribou, cheetahs, Thomson’s gazelle, white sharks , lions, walruses, sea lions, demoiselle cranes, and birds of paradise. Together, they stand for the whole inventory of what is at stake in a world bedeviled by environmental crisis. Through Earth, their lives and their struggles to survive are ours to share.
Where We Fit In
Save for their activity behind the camera, and the voice of narrator James Earl Jones, human beings are missing from Earth, an absence that cuts in a few directions.
The film’s stupendous depictions of wild nature nurture and encourage the knowledge and empathy upon which engagement with the global environmental crisis ultimately rests. In the plight of a polar bear imperiled by melting ice, moreover, viewers will perhaps anticipate the dangers that global warming poses to humanity itself.
Yet the movie’s general reticence on the causes of climate change, and especially on human responsibility, may sensitize millions to our global predicament without focusing their attention on the actions necessary to save the planet. What good is a diagnosis, one might ask, without a plan of remedy?
In part, the filmmakers’ determination to appeal to younger audiences accounts for the soft-pedaling approach they chose. Earth takes aim at the next generation, and is careful not to scare, shock, or demoralize through forbidding indictments of the human hand that has touched and changed even the most distant places on this planet, and shaped the fate of each and every one of the animals shown. The producers and a handful of boosters have built educational websites to bear some of that freight, to inspire young people to commit themselves to action for the preservation of the planet.
For Earth’s sake, let’s hope they do.
Bernard Unti, Ph.D. is senior policy adviser and special assistant to the CEO of The HSUS. He is the author of Protecting All Animals, a history of The HSUS, and is currently writing a book on the 19th century animal protection movement.
