David Attenborough: A life on Our Planet (Netflix)
Rating: 4/5
Our tiny blue home, bubbling with life and skyrocketing through the vast cosmos, has trouble brewing at home.
Humanity is headed for an uncertain future. What happened and what can we do next?
Sir David Attenborough's biographical documentary tries to answers these questions.
Attenborough takes us through his extraordinary, one-of-its-kind career documenting the natural world, and as he does, he charts the interminable destruction of the wild and how the Holocene balance was disturbed in the last 90 years.
He tells what our careless living could cost us, and what our only hope is: sustainable living.
We see Attenborough as a sweet, young thing. This is both a homely and alienation experience. On the one hand, he is one of the wise sages of our times. On the other, a young Attenborough is so far before our times, there is something unreal about it.
We see footage of forests being destroyed. In one heartbreaking scene, a lone surviving climbs atop a lonely tree. In another, a polar bear swims the ocean with no slab of ice to climb aboard.
Your misanthropy when you see that human population growth is inversely proportional to the amount of forest cover.
The story makes a heartening full circle when we see that the wild is reclaiming Chernobyl. The reminder here is that nature has to make do with our scraps --scraps we had no business creating in the first place.
The shots are exquisite and the camera work lives up to the persona of Attenborough.
With all its warning hazards, 'A life on our planet' is a celebration of the natural world.