Green Planet could been seen as a sequel to the 1994 Private Life of Plants. The series if packed full of timelapse footage, the whole point is too speed up the action to show you plants in competition, speed things up fast enough and you'll see plants do move and compete in some of the many ways which animals do. David Attenborough is also back and in this he actually spends a bit more time in front of the camera. He's fantastic as ever and these sequences are actually some of my favourites, the pace is a bit more relaxed and he's such a good presenter. The series takes us around the world, including both North and South America. The footage as ever now is super smooth, with clear picture and sound quality. I bought the blu ray and as very happy with the results. Where the series doesn't quite work for me is some of the super-fast choppy editing during the "action sequences" I suppose you'd call them. The pacing sometimes is a bit frenetic and the focus is less on educating the viewer than trying to wow and entertain you. The series occasionally also likes to try and invoke a popular trend currently in cinema of having long takes without any cuts, unbroken tracking shots lasting for 1-2 minutes sometimes. Even though we are now focussing mostly on plants, they still seem to want to have the "good guys" and the "bad guys" sometimes in a sequence. Scary music is played when a certain plants appears were clearly not supposed to be routing for. Surely these plants are just doing what nature is making them do? Do they not have a right to exist too? Can plants be moral? This good v bad aspect just doesn't work for plants I'm afraid. There is also going to be some repetition in here, if you've seen the 2009 BBC David Attenborough series Life then that covers quite a bit of what we get in this series. Where the Green Planet is at it's strongest though is in delivering to the viewer new discoveries such as the information highway now believed to exist within forests. There's still some beautiful photography, such as bats flying down in the night to drink the nectar from flowers. Things also take a weird turn when we get into the Deserts episode. The music oddly switches to a much more an electronic synthesizer sound. You can imagine a group of BBC producers sat round a table saying hey, young people all like that Stranger Things right? Because it had cool 80s inspired music right? So let's put that in our nature documentary programme and they'll all love it right? At other times too the BBC is just afraid now of using a single locked down tripod shot, no the camera constantly has to be moving, swirling, zooming, panning, often for no reason. It doesn't reveal any new information or add anything. They clearly think audiences will get bored if the camera isn't constantly on the move. You don't need to do this in a documentary though, this is not a Sam Mendes action film. The behind the scenes features are always interesting, and the final episode which basically looks at farming is also very informative. The deserts episode was perhaps the most interesting in that it's just incredible that some plants can survive in those conditions, I think the seasonal episode though perhaps has the most range.
Review of The Green Planet
