'Planet Earth' a beautiful but bloody view of how animals live

March 23, 2007

BY DOUG ELFMAN
Chicago Sun-Times
I once screened "Babe: Pig in the City" for a girlfriend named Tiffany. Halfway through the lovely but dark movie, a stray kitten cries to other emaciated animals, "I'm hungry." Tiffany jumped from the couch. Tears screamed out of her face. I had to turn the movie off. She must have wept for 20 minutes.
Here's my message to Tiffany. This new Discovery Channel series called "Planet Earth" -- don't watch it. You'll cry your eyes out from all the animals getting killed and eaten, not to mention the tiny elephant calf who wanders, blinded by a sandstorm, away from mom, in an empty desert, to a certain, lonely death.
"Planet Earth" will break. Your. Heart. It broke mine.
Bravo to you people who can watch these animal shows. You're a steady bunch. Animals bite into animals while they're still alive. Bears fish for food in globally warmed environments that are melting away.
Disney would call this "The Circle of Life." I call it "The Circle of Death."
"Planet Earth" is a work of art, though. It's gorgeously shot in high definition. Five years in the making, the 11 episodes focus on the lives of nonhumans in their habitats around the globe.
The scope is pretty crazy. Seventy-one camera operators spent a cumulative 2,000 days sneaking into polar bear habitats, African deserts, caves, seas -- you name it. They used 40:1 zoom lenses and a gyro-stabilized helicopter camera to shoot intimate scenes up to a mile away, trying not to disturb living things.
Some scenes are unprecedented. You hear narrator Sigourney Weaver say stuff like this a lot: For the first time, the entire journey of a deaf and blind polar bear cub is caught on film. And: A cameraman spent 45 days in hiding to get a few minutes of footage of a male, six-plumed bird of paradise in New Guinea.
Fox News viewers can rest assured. Al Gore does not show up with a flow chart in a cave or on an ice cap. "Planet Earth" is not an explicit political statement about how we need to take action to stop the planet from eroding.
But there are endangered species everywhere, and environs are vanishing to the point that, say, polar bears seem doomed. This is the way the world is. If you resurrected "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" with Marlin Perkins, it too would spot Earth in reverse. There's just no getting around it.
It's simply a fact when Weaver says of Amur leopards, "The future of the entire species hangs on the survival of a handful of mothers and cubs."
For sure, the killing is overkill. Orchestral music (though striking) sounds ominously when wolves dine on caribou. You could say this is a music score for Darwinism. But then, every carnivorous animal preys on another. You could play ominous music over me eating a hamburger. Cows die somehow for my belly.
It's certainly not all death and destruction. Most images are just beautiful frames of rarely seen or never seen jungles, avalanches and reefs. Feel free to "eww" and "aww" at super cute monkeys, penguins, cubs, wild baby pandas, majestic golden eagles, oriental pheasants, arctic foxes, fur seals, and on and on.
But you may not want to watch this series if you get irrationally sad watching a hungry snow leopard bite into a lovely markhor in the Himalayas, because without freshly slaughtered dinner, the mother leopard's young cub will starve and die. The Circle of Death is a ravenous, desperate sphere.