If there's one genre that keeps on recycling the same plot lines over and over again, it's the nature documentary.
Here's what these people consider high drama: Get to the food before you die. There you go, I just wrote like 50 documentaries. You'd think, just once, one of these hacks would mix it up with some of the other rich drama to be found in the animal kingdom, like getting to the water before you die.
These shows also prove that most of the complaints leveled at today's film and TV are vastly overblown, because as in entertainment, the best parts of the natural world are the sex and the violence. In fact, if you added a subplot to every episode of House or CSI where a character had to get to Burger King before he died of malnutrition, then ran it side by side with Wild Kingdom, no one would be able to tell the difference. Some might say that's the problem with modern media, but I say that's why nature documentaries such as Disney's EARTH are so damn great.
Spanning both poles and most places between, EARTH follows the progression of seasons and their meaning for the polar bears, foxes, swordfish, and a score of other animals that live outside the human world.
Often, they look a whole lot farther away than that. Visually, EARTH is never not gorgeous; both its animals and its landscapes look more vivid than whatever grimy, real-life office or classroom you're reading this in instead of slaving away on that work that doesn't really need doing in the first place. These animals all hunt, breed, travel and die without trading chunks of their lives doing some other jerk's bidding, and after you've seen some of what the rest of the world is up to — especially the swordfish and southern lights, which are so unreally beautiful they're like the CG of 20 years from now — you might consider joining them.
Fellow Discovery Channel junkies will be familiar with some of the shots, but there's nothing like seeing a white shark eating a seal on a 40-foot screen to remind you that the world is terrifying and you should never step foot in it again. Frankly, when they're this good, it's no chore to watch them for a second time.
The eye candy's augmented by the narration of Darth Vader himself. James Earl Jones' voice is so great he could be reading my own epitaph and I'd be happy about it. Here, he blends his usual dignity with a light humor that never gets too cutesy.
But this kind of documentary is at its best when there's no human element at all. EARTH understands that, a lot of the time, the way to say something special about the world is to let the shots speak for themselves. If all they have to say is "Hey, sometimes this place is really, really beautiful," it's a sentiment worth remembering.
Grade: B