Review of David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet (2020) by Mayacritic — 01 Jun 2021

If you are a fan of the captivating colors and cinematography and Netflix nature documentaries and the silky smooth voice of David Attenborough, the film A Life on Our Planet should be on your ever-growing list of things to watch.

If you aren’t too fond of beautiful shots of vast landscapes and have no idea who David Attenborough is, I would still recommend giving this film a watch purely based on the film’s main message. According to Attenborough, who elaborates on how “the natural world is fading.

The evidence is all around. It’s happened in my lifetime. I’ve seen it with my own eyes” and spends the rest of the film telling his “witness statement and my vision for the future, the story of how we came to make this our greatest mistake, and how, if we act now, we can put it right” to save our planet.

This film provides a very good baseline history of environmentalism to those who may not be aware of the history of the destruction of the planet, but if you would consider yourself familiar with this issue and this information has already been drilled too far into your head I would not recommend this film for you.

Some of the clips shown in this film are ones you may have seen before in other documentaries, and the messages warning you about the dying planet may feel like second nature to you. The film can grab your attention with its use of emotion as a persuasion tool, also known as pathos.

The severity of the effects of the dying planet is emphasized in one scene by showing Attenborough playing with a popular, well-known species, a gorilla, and describing how this species is dying out. If the threat of no longer having cute little gorilla faces in the world isn’t enough to convince you of the severity of the issue, immediately after there is a jarring and graphic scene of someone harpooning a whale to show the effects of whaling.

These scenes juxtaposed each other in their methods to convince you (the one with the gorilla focusing on the cuteness of the animal, and the whale taking the more gruesome route) that this is an issue you should care about.

I think this method does a good job of drilling it into your mind. And if those scenes weren’t enough to tug on your heartstrings and let out a tear or two, the film shows a clip of a group of people crying and watching in horror while attending the 2019 IMF Spring Meeting, (and no it's not because they were looking at the climate budget) as they were witnessing another scene depicting another loss of animal life, but this time the focus was on the human reactions.

As Attenborough states earlier in the documentary, “now that it was visible, it was no longer acceptable”, which I thought this scene really drove his point in as this was a very clever way to get the audience to feel sympathy and feel something about wanting to solve this issue, by focusing on how other humans interact with it.

society have possibly never seen a sustainable type of living before. My favorite feature of this film was a reoccurring graphic that popped up at different points, depicting different statistics throughout the years, such as the world population, carbon in the atmosphere, ppm, and the remaining wilderness percentage.

The population numbers flickered up, starting from 2.3 billion people in 1937, 2.7, 3.0, 4.3, 5.9, all the way to 7.8 billion people in 2020. As that shot up, the remaining wilderness percentage fell, 66, 64, 62, 55, 46, 35, dropping like a countdown like a timer of our time remaining on Earth.

And it almost is, the scene right after shows grueling renditions of the conditions that we will have to survive in, insane weather patterns, most of the planet being uninhabitable by the 2100s, the sixth mass extinction event will be taking place.

Overall this documentary was a very enjoyable experience, so I would score it a ⅘ stars. It would have been a perfect score in my book if I had not seen and heard the material before, but for those just beginning to explore the wonders of our planet, this documentary may be perfect for you.

With stunningly colorful and vibrant images accompanied by an iconic narrator, I would recommend watching David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet, and I hope this film can capture your attention in ways you were not expecting.