‘A Life on Our Planet’ — a bleak final warning for humanity
This beautifully shot documentary packs more of an emotional gut-punch than any drama — and is more terrifying than any horror movie — you’ll see this year. Despite the breathtaking cinematography, this is not an easy watch. Sir David Attenborough, the revered 94-year-old broadcaster and natural historian, explains, with his trademark gravity and passion, the damage mankind has done to the planet in just the span of his own career. He begins in the city of Pripyat, in Ukraine, which has been deserted since the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in 1986. That disaster, leading to an uninhabitable area, Attenborough says, was a result of “bad planning and human error.”
The current crisis facing our natural world — the way our lifestyle is decimating the biodiversity that is crucial to environmental balance and stability — is also, he warns, “a result of bad planning and human error, and it too will lead to what we see (in Pripyat) — a place in which we cannot live.”
The film pulls no punches. Besides the relentless horror of the statistics (90 percent of the large fish in the sea removed since the 1950s; wild animal populations more than halved in the same time) there are the stark visuals — the haunting apocalyptic landscape of a dead coral reef; a solitary orang-utan clambering up a solitary branchless tree in an area that used to be thick rainforest.
There is a retrospective element — a look back at Attenborough’s glittering career — but it is his present as an old man close to the end of his life that holds the most weight. There are times when he addresses the camera directly and you can feel his anger and distress as he examines what we have done to so much of the beauty he has witnessed.
There is optimism, finally, in the last 30 minutes as he lays out how we could avert disaster if we act now. Simple solutions are there — e.g. stop eating meat; cut out fossil fuels; create no-fish zones, halt the growth in global population. But they require a global will.
Earth has already survived five mass-extinction events. It will survive a sixth. Whether humanity survives depends on us choosing to do so and making the necessary sacrifices. Either way, we’ll get what we deserve.
There are times when Attenborough addresses the camera directly and you can feel his anger at what we have done.