DAVID ATTENBOROUGH IS BACK, AND HE BROUGHT THE WALRUSES
The broadcaster and natural historian lands another winning documentary with Seven Worlds, One Planet
Listing the nature programmes narrated, and sometimes written and produced, by the extremely industrious David Attenborough would take about all the space I have here. Just listing the major ones — the Frozen Planets, the Blue Planets, the Planet Earths — would be a stretch. Within the last year, he’s added 15 more hours with the highly praised
Our Planet for Netflix and now Seven Worlds, One Planet.
For the large and fiercely devoted fan club of Attenborough and the BBC Natural History Unit, which produced it, I’ve done my job by noting where and when
Seven Worlds, One Planet can be seen. Nothing else really needs to be said.
It’s interesting, but not essential, to know that the title refers to Earth’s seven continents, each of which gets an episode. Otherwise, your confidence that there will be fascinating and beautiful footage of animals shot from every angle and distance, edited into short scenes that will make you gasp, laugh and cry, backed by the melancholy authority of Attenborough’s narration, is not misplaced.
So that’s that. Except maybe, if you don’t shut down your scepticism completely, you might entertain a question or two as you watch Seven Worlds, One
Planet, such as, do we really need this many nature documentaries?
That thought might suggest itself most acutely during the fourth episode, set in Asia, when a sequence about walruses tumbling off a cliff on the Arctic coast is highly reminiscent of a much talked-about scene in last year’s Our
Planet. Why does it seem so familiar? Because the two shows shared film from
the same shoot, and some of the most dramatic images in the Seven Worlds scene are the very same shots that were in Our Planet.
That’s an extreme example. But throughout Seven Worlds, there are scenes that trip the déjà vu metre. Penguins traversing a beach full of sea mammals, albatross parents leaving their chick behind, polar bears wading where they formerly walked on ice — we’ve seen it before, in Attenborough’s programmes or in similar shows on PBS, Discovery or the Smithsonian Channel.
As with Our Planet and other recent series, Seven Worlds does differentiate itself by addressing human depredations — climate change, deforestation, predation — more directly than in the past. Attenborough frequently mentions the endangered status of the animals being shown, and the last five minutes or so of each episode are devoted to a longer consideration of a particular threat.
But there’s an oddly muted quality to these declarations, though they’re certainly heartfelt. It seems likely that the 93-year-old Attenborough has reserves of anger and heartbreak about the plight of the animals he’s spent his career documenting, but his professional mode is polite optimism. Nearly every cautionary tale about humanity’s dire influence has a happy twist — the chick survives; the lynx are protected; the whales rebound; the seal lets the poor penguin escape. People may be the problem, but they almost never appear onscreen (except in the howthey-got-that-shot segments that end the episodes). As Attenborough presents it, the slide toward potential planetary destruction is a genteel business.
This is of a piece with the larger impulse of these shows to anthropomorphise and sentimentalise their subjects for maximum emotional effect, turning the Darwinian imperatives of animal survival into comic or tragic sketches about parenthood, feeding, sex and male pride. (Elephant seals, musk oxen, wild hamsters and Sarada lizards are among the species in Seven
Worlds whose males are shown butting heads over mates or territory.) The filmmakers expertly assemble and score these silent dramas, with their Chaplinesque bear cubs and Tati-like penguins.
But if shows like Seven Worlds, built on the earnest and astoundingly dedicated work of many very talented people aren’t entirely to my taste — the statistics in this case, according to the BBC, include 41 countries, 1,794 filming days and more than 1,500 individuals — that doesn’t stop me from enjoying the amazing things in them. Seven Worlds is full of the usual beauty and spectacle: a forest full of fireflies that could have been painted by Seurat; a thrillingly close shot of an anaconda thundering along a riverbed; a dingo in relentless pursuit of a kangaroo that can’t afford a single stumble.
And nothing’s going to stop the nature documentaries from coming — the BBC unit will spend the next few years making a 10-part series for NBC about the animals and landscapes of the Western Hemisphere. It’s scheduled for 2024. Perhaps by then the tone will be a little less genteel.
The animal movie survival turns
into comic or tragic
sketches about
parenthood, feeding,
sex and male pride