Nature programmes used to celebrate how enormous and wondrous our world is. Then the climate crisis forced them to adapt, so they became programmes about how wondrous our world was, and still could be, if we could only stop damaging it. Now, wildlife series are evolving again, and Life on Our Planet is part of a new breed that looks at humanity killing itself, and says: hey, nature has been through worse than this before. Here, the story that will happily carry on without us is told to us as an awesome, cinematic epic.
The concept is very close to that of Chris Packham’s superior BBC series Earth. We are taken through a timeline spanning more than 2bn years, during which life on the planet begins, evolves and is repeatedly threatened by mass extinctions, caused by changes in climate or sudden catastrophes. The natural world that humans are only one small part of today is itself a small fraction of the species that have ever existed – but the creatures of the present have inherited their key characteristics from the vanished greats of the past.
Life on Our Planet takes advantage of modern CGI and photography techniques that mean film shot in natural habitats, footage of animals that are real but have been transferred to a studio and sequences conjured from scratch on a computer are nearly indistinguishable. Some of the extinct land-based animals digitally brought back to life look a little like they’re hovering across the ground as they walk, and there are a few scenes where implausible numbers of dinosaurs have gathered on the same landscape for a nice photo, but we largely move smoothly between then and now.
Apart from the bits where volcanoes, asteroids or carbon dioxide molecules throw a wobbler and almost get everyone killed, the regular currency of natural history programmes abides: we’re watching fighting, or we’re watching mating. All of 374m years ago, a dunkleosteus struggles to crack the shell of an ammonoid; today, a marsh frog springs up suddenly to hurl its projectile tongue at a dragonfly. Two arthropleura, ancestors of the millipede, have a lovely time in the forest 345m years in the past; right now, a jumping spider the size of a grain of rice can be seen closeup, contorting its legs into what look like disco poses to try to attract a female.
Those small moments illustrate how mammals, reptiles, arthropods, fish, cephalopods and other “dynasties”, as the programme likes to call them, established themselves via natural selection. “Throughout history, life has been waging an unending war,” says Morgan Freeman’s film-trailer voiceover, slightly nonsensically. “One dynasty rising, only to be vanquished by the next.”
Whether the script Freeman has been given annoys you or not will determine whether you can survive to the end of Life on Our Planet’s eight episodes. As well as treating billions of animals in the same broad biological grouping as if they were an army or a sports team enjoying success together – “From this moment on,” says Freeman as the dunkleosteus demonstrates the power of having developed jaws, “vertebrates would never look back” – the narration is prone to repeating the same hyperbole.
“Beneath the waves,” purrs Freeman as the story starts in the ocean depths, “life had taken hold, and was about to change our planet for ever.” Then as moss evolves into plants with stronger cell walls that can grow skywards: “A green revolution was coming that would change the landscape for ever.” When fish morph into creatures with rudimentary lungs and legs that allow them to survive on land: “The evolution from fin to limb took millions of years. But once completed, life on land would never be the same again.” Mammals and reptiles vying for dominance of the land is a battle that “changed everything for life on our planet”. Dinosaurs, meanwhile, are “the most iconic dynasty of them all” and, later on, “some of the most iconic creatures to ever walk the Earth”. The greening of Earth in the Devonian period is “one of the most amazing events of all time”.
You can see why Life on Our Planet has gone in that direction: 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. Watch the show with an inquisitive child and you might find them asking questions that the programme doesn’t answer, such as what caused the spikes and falls in oxygen/CO2 levels that led to the mass extinctions of the ancient past. As it is, Life on Our Planet is the sort of empty spectacle we no longer have time for.
• Life on Our Planet is on Netflix.
