SummaryWith help from Industrial Light & Magic, the eight-part documentary series narrated by Morgan Freeman shows the creatures that once roamed the Earth billions of years ago.
SummaryWith help from Industrial Light & Magic, the eight-part documentary series narrated by Morgan Freeman shows the creatures that once roamed the Earth billions of years ago.
Life On Our Planet is a fascinating look at how life evolved on Earth, with stunning visual effects that show how long-extinct species might have lived.
Diving into this eight-part series and its seven-plus hours is a bit like signing on to a semester-long symposium on evolution, biodiversity, the history of mass extinctions and the resilience of the organism. This is not to say it isn't thoroughly fascinating, just serious.
Too many critics have this wrong. I watch a lot of docs and this is now in my top 5 all time. It makes you think deeply on our insignificance, and our influence. It makes you feel more epathetic with nature, and with each other. It's transcendent almost.
pros:
nice narrating ( even if he mispronounced a few words)
interesting to show the impacts of the great extinctions
more than just dinosaurs
Some completely made up "facts" like dino dancing which is just stupid.
zero blood... feels very much done for all ages.
The main draw is dinosaurs but they barely appear until mid-series. Too much screentime is spent on slo-mo recreations of meteorological events which, let’s face it, aren’t as thrilling as T-rexes fighting triceratops. When we do get some action, squeamish cameras cut away before any bloodshed.
Epochal events are hard to capture in images, so it’s trying to make us feel the hugeness of what’s happening with words. But if the series was less concerned with constantly reinforcing how incredible everything is, it could have found room to be more informative.
It's not the worst documentary I've ever seen, but is certainly one of the worst paleontology-related documentary of 2023. It has its moments and the narration is pretty decent. Some Paleozoic segments are alright. But other than these positives, it falls flat due to the constant focus on "evolutionary arms race" as the pure driver of evolution: it is a factor, but not the most dominant. It also has so many inaccuracies that I cannot bare to watch it, specifically with most of the dinosaur segments. The shots were nice, but clearly the science behind this show is far from decent. It also doesn't know what it wants to be with its constant back and forth to modern day segments (some work as a benefit, but most don't). So overall, I definitely didn't like it.