"Life On Our Planet" Season 1 Review

“Life On Our Planet” Season 1 Review

(*This article contains topics of extinction, death and natural disasters that could be triggering. Read at your own discretion.*)

“Life on Our Planet” is a documentary-style TV series narrated by the one and only Morgan Freeman. Directed by Adam Chapman, Sophie Lanfear, Barny Revill, Nick Shoolingin-Jordan and Gisle Sverdrup, the eight-hour-long series centers around the evolution and survival of life on Earth within the past 4 billion years.

The Netflix TV series, produced by Steven Spielberg, tells the story of life on Earth through the rise and fall of dynasties, with mammals being the most recent dominating dynasty. Each episode’s title reflects an era in Earth’s history.

The series starts with Freeman’s voice guiding the audience through a strange prehistoric scene: an ancient saber-tooth cat called a smilodon and a giant terror bird face off in a beautiful, uninhabited safari. Freeman’s voice announces that this is “the story of life”.

The opening credits roll and the audience watches a quick replay of the world’s evolution, including the five great extinction events, throughout different periods of history. Freeman’s voice returns and the audience is whisked back away to an ancient land. However, this land is one that the audience can see, comprehend and grasp.

“Life on Our Planet” is filmed as a wildlife documentary, focusing on particular creatures as they live out the natural cycle of life. The audience watches the exhilarating lives and evolutions of trilobites, fringeheads, allosauruses, diplodocuses and ornithischians.

However, these creatures are millions of years old and extinct. So, how were these creatures’ lives filmed? A majority of the scenes, including the ones of haunted gnome-looking squid relatives and fighting T-Rexes are CGI-created.

Terrifyingly; however, it’s almost impossible to tell the CGI animals from the real ones unless you know which animals are extinct. The detailed close-ups of ancient reptiles’ scales and dinosaurs’ tails help make the creatures seem even more realistic than they are.

The production and planning for “Life on Our Planet” took six years. The 440-person crew visited six continents to select natural landscapes that could be populated with ancient creatures via CGI and VFX. Toy dinosaurs were used to stage the scene then science and VFX were blended to create a realistic-looking long-deceased creature.

The result is a natural historical documentary that is unlike others that have preceded it. “Life on Our Planet” does the unexpected. When the audience expects the prey to lose to the predator, the audience often gets surprised. The documentary-style series keeps the audience on their toes.

The series attempts to humanize the struggle of the animals’ survival by having the audience root for the underdog creatures on the screen. The series uses music to stir the emotions in its audience that it wants to draw out. For example, in the millennium-long war between insects, there is a battle scene between the ants and the termites. The tense music exacerbates the tension and anxiety of the battle while dramatizing the stakes.

In addition to the unexpected, surprise moments, there are also heart-warming scenes sprinkled throughout the TV-PG series. For instance, when the giant Arthropleura in Episode 3 struggles to find his nearby, sleeping mate, the upbeat music turns the scene into a light-hearted comedy. In addition, there are numerous scenes of dinosaur mothers protecting or teaching their tiny baby dinosaurs how to live.

While the attention to detail is incredible within the animals themselves, the attention to detail in the landscape and scenery is just as remarkable. The series incorporates beautiful shots of volcanoes, lava, oceans, forests and deserts. The natural event shots - of lightning, hurricanes, tsunamis and asteroids - show just how powerful and resilient Earth is.

However, this incredible amount of detail combined with the humanization of the animals proves to be slightly morbid when the audience can clearly see the impact of the extinction events, particularly the asteroid, on the animal dynasties. This is also true concerning the natural disasters that are displayed and vividly showcased in the series.

Overall, “Life on Our Planet” was a high-quality and entertaining nature documentary series. Any potential viewers should be aware of the extinction-level violence and destruction that occurs in some of the episodes. This eight-episode series, narrated by Morgan Freeman and directed by Steven Spielberg, showcases the survival and evolution of the remaining one percent of species’ predecessors throughout Earth’s history.

Rating: 4/5

Sarah Taylor is a first-year majoring in telecommunications. To contact her, email smt6314@psu.edu.