Then 93, Attenborough opens the film in Chernobyl, the remnants of a world ruined by man strewn all about him. For Netflix, Attenborough produced “A Life On Our Planet” as his “witness statement” after observing all corners of the Earth for decades. Whether we choose to create a home for others, too, is up to us.”Īttenborough got yet more explicit in 2020 with a film to which he lent significantly more than voiceover narration. “More than half of us now live in urban environments. “The potential to see animals thriving within our cities is achievable across the globe,” he insists. At the end of that episode, and thus the series, Attenborough chose a blunt conclusion. In one particularly terrible sequence, “Cities” demonstrates exactly how awful it can be for those turtles when humans swarm their beaches and build highways alongside them, showing a doomed procession of babies waddling onto a busy road. When “Planet Earth II” added a specific “Cities” episode, it not only showed off the production’s incredible ability to capture life in all corners of the world, but its determination to make its viewers understand not just how catastrophic climate change could be, but how much damage it’s already done. This became especially unavoidable in 2016’s “ Planet Earth II,” the highly anticipated follow-up to the game-changing “Planet Earth.” (Attenborough wrote and performed the narration for both, and not for nothing: it says everything about how synonymous Attenborough became with “Planet Earth” that the gambit of casting Sigourney Weaver as narrator for the first series’ American broadcast was not repeated for the second.) Over the years, Attenborough and the projects in which he’s chosen to participate have threaded their awe of nature with an increasingly dire warning about its man-made decline. Attenborough did not produce “The Year the Earth Changed,” but in tapping him to deliver its message, the team behind the documentary knows exactly what it’s doing. It’s striking, and more than a little depressing, to realize just how badly humans treat our surroundings every day, and how devastating it can be for everything else that lives there. Checking in on various locations a month, two months, six months, a year into human quarantine, the 48-minute documentary makes a compelling case for how much damage humans cause on a daily basis, and how much we could help revive the endangered planet by simply adjusting our behavior to coexist more peacefully alongside the animal kingdom.īeard and his various camera crews show us turtles getting full access to a beach for the first time in decades, penguins getting back to their chicks in a fraction of the time without having to factor in human crowds, and a dormant luxury safari site becoming a fertile feeding ground for a leopard who can now ditch his nocturnal hunting habits. Directed by Tom Beard, the film takes a unique look back at the past year under pandemic lockdown by showing all the ways in which the natural world thrived once human activity suddenly slowed down. “The Year the Earth Changed,” by contrast, is much more explicit about the human race’s role in the natural world.
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