Alright! Today I'm reviewing Our Planet, a Netflix documentary about, you guessed it, our planet. Our Planet is about the lovely and vast place where all of us, male and female, bond and free, live together with the wonders that Mother Earth has provided us. In an attempt to show us some of those wonders, years of research, surveillance, and compilation have been gathered in an effort to teach us about the wonderful planet we live on and the impact we have on it.
If the documentary I'm describing sounds like every other nature documentary, well, that's my bad - it's not. The only viable comparison is the BBC's Planet Earth, also narrated by David Attenborough, and even then this almost surpasses that series (I'm not sure which I like better - they're of equal quality, but I've seen Planet Earth so many times that each episode is too well-remembered to rewatch). Our Planet stuns and marvels the audience with its unbelievably high-quality footage of nature that gets close and personal.
From a purely production standpoint, that feat alone is astounding. We're a long way from my old VHS tapes of black widows and beavers - nature has never looked better. Wonders of the world that would otherwise be completely inaccessible to the average man are now available at the touch of our fingertips, even without a Netflix subscription (During COVID, they uploaded the entire first season to YouTube to help school children).
My one criticism is that the scale and cinematography of the series are so large and beautiful that it feels like they're trying too hard to one-up the aforementioned Planet Earth - it's cinematic in visuals through and through. It's beautiful, but the beauty almost overpowers the important message the series carries. Additionally, it treads territory you've seen before, with quirky mating dances and cordyceps segments feeling awful familiar. I also wasn't a fan of the second season only had four episodes, which was unreasonably short.
Otherwise, Our Planet is utterly fantastic and likely to go down as one of my favorite television shows ever. The beauty, while trying too hard, is still very beautiful, and the phenomenon featured astounds and impresses. Episodes end on cliffhangers that will make your mouth drop, everything with blue whales is unbelievable, walrus segments are tragic, and the segment on the Oarfish was wholly informative and magical. You'll find yourself asking how such wonders of nature can exist in a world full of Wal-Mart parking lots and human strife.
Overall, I give Our Planet a 10/10. "Our Planet Earth."
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