All too often, specials that promote themselves as important are merely self-important. Discovery Channel’s “Planet Earth” touts itself as epic, yet it’s no exaggeration.
The 11-part series, kicking off Sunday, March 25, is nothing short of amazing. Even stalwart fans of nature documentaries are bound to be astonished because much of this is new. It took 71 camera people more than 2,000 days in 200 locations to capture these high-definition images.
This revealing look at our planet teaches how the world was formed. It also looks at different climates and how animals adapt to them. This is not a show to be watched while going through e-mail. Instead, gather the family, turn off the lights and marvel.
“It is a great gift to people,” narrator Sigourney Weaver says. “We have never seen anything like it because we haven’t had the technology to photograph so many creatures in their element doing what they do without any interference from the cameraman. I felt like I was in a rocket ship each time I watched, and it was such an intimate look at so many different species, and a kind of a celebration of how well everything works on our planet. Even when it’s upsetting to see a lion eat an elephant, you see the Arctic fox take a duckling, and then you see it has five kids, and you have respect for how things work.”
Many images throughout the 11 hours are remarkable, such as the blue bird of paradise. While courting, the male puffs up his cobalt feathers, then spins. The female he was trying to impress would have yawned, could she.
“The females are so well, ‘oh, yeah,’ ” Weaver says.
“It is extraordinary when that bird does that and disappears into this spinning disc,” Huw Cordey, a field producer, says.
As a nature documentarian since 1989, Cordey has visited 50 countries. For this series, traveling in Mongolia and maneuvering in a New Mexico cave most impressed him.
“You would have thought this would have been the most hideous experience known to man or woman,” he says. “It was the most beautiful cave in the world. It was this unbelievable privilege of getting into a place that’s really closed to people. It took two years to get permission to film that.”
As for Mongolia, Cordey says, “It’s a very surprising desert because it snows. It blows in from Siberia. And we were after one of the rarest, the wild Bactrian camel. Every camel you would see, or know of, is domestic. The only truly wild camels left are in the Gobi Desert, and nobody’s really filmed them before. We were there for two months and had six filming opportunities.”
“I hope that what people will feel is the world is a much bigger and more surprising place than they might have thought prior to watching it,” Cordey says. “We live in a world where communications are so amazing you might think there is nothing left to explore. This shows that there are amazing wildernesses out there. We all set out trying to reawaken people’s interest in the natural world. By using this technology and going to the Gobi Desert, I think that is what captured people’s imagination in the U.K.”
