Discover wonders of life on ‘Earth’

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Here is an authentic Hollywood wildlife mystery.

Back in its 12-part BBC miniseries past as “Planet Earth” three years ago, “Earth” sported a narration by naturalist Sir David Attenborough, surely as trustworthy a guide to nature as film or TV show could have these days. Then, when it was condensed into a two-hour movie and shown around Europe, the narrator became Patrick Stewart.

Now, in the adapted form that Disney’s nature division is opening around the United States on Earth Day today, the narrator is James Earl Jones. Surely, there isn’t a creature among us on this imperiled planet who would complain about the voice of James Earl Jones—it’s the one God probably borrows when he has something important to say—but one can’t help feeling that somewhere along the way, the narration may have been Disneyfied a tad. You’ll notice when you see this completely irresistible nature documentary that the narration is indeed bland and sometimes even a bit cutesy—by far, the weakest part of the film.

But what sights. Any parent who wants to give any small child some sense of what a wonderment life is on this planet isn’t going to do better at the moment than this. It’s admittedly not even half as good a movie as some of the truly miraculous nature documentaries of the past couple of decades — “Microcosmos,” “Winged Migration,” and, of course, the smash hit “March of the Penguins” — but it’s spectacular enough in your friendly neighborhood megaplex at this particular moment.

It’s about the “23 and a half degree tilt” at the sun that, says James Earl, accounts for the change of seasons on earth and the incredible proliferation of life, from the endangered polar bears of the Arctic, where one-third of all the trees on earth are and whose melting ice is depriving the bears of their habitat, to the mating dances of birds of paradise in the tropics to humpback whales migrating to the Antarctic past a great white shark—a real one—who truly seems the size of the one in “Jaws.”

Much is made of the savage “cycle of life” (and death) in this film but it always knows there are going to be small children watching and never even comes close to indulging in a “money shot” of some predator sinking teeth into prey, drawing blood and then rending flesh.

It always — always — stops very discreetly and weirdly short of that—when the Siberian wolf succeeds in running down a baby caribou, when a pride of lions in the Kalahari desert attacks a grown elephant in frustration and starvation, when the rocketing leopard takes down an antelope.

The chase is thrilling enough. Parents can explain what comes next. This film isn’t in the trauma business. When that gigantic great white shark leaps out of the ocean in triumph with a black fragment of another creature unmistakably hanging from the right side of its jaw, that’s as much horror as you’re going to see in “Earth.”

Of terror, there is plenty; of ensuing horror, there is none.

The movie is much happier, of course, to show you babies — baby polar bears just out of hibernation struggling to get footing in the Arctic snow (while their mother sensually and joyously indulges in a post-hibernation slide around in it), baby ducks jumping out of trees onto soft carpets of leaves. Even so, the toughest emotional moment in the film concerns a lost young elephant in the Kalahari desert who tracks its mother’s footsteps in the wrong direction toward oblivion.

Passing references are made to the horrifying potential of environmental changes but this, to be sure, is not “An Inconvenient Truth,” not even for an Earth Day opening.

And the aerial views are spectacular. It’s wonderful to realize that even in an age of unlimited digital imagination — where anything can be invented onscreen—real life footage can still show you things you could never have imagined.

Nature cinematography has long since learned to work with balloons — whose relative silence scares no species (see “Winged Migration” for the most amazing results of that)— but even so there is a clearcut helicopter or airplane aerial shot here of a mile or more of migrating caribou (whose numbers in the Arctic are said to be in the millions) that is, yes, genuinely awesome.

That’s what has changed most since Disney virtually invented the “True Life” genre a half century ago with documentaries like “Nature’s Half Acre.”

The comedy and the savagery of the natural world aren’t much changed (even though the ecology is). The photographic techniques developed, though, are astounding.

jsimon@buffnews.com

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