Column:

Compacted 'Earth' maintains message

With an environmental message, it appropriately uses recycled footage.

By Patrick Daugherty

Published April 27, 2009

Early in "Earth," we are given a stark reminder of a 21st century truth: it sucks to be a polar bear right now.

And in 2009, if you don't care about the environment, it also certainly sucks to be you. You're admonished as a heretic if you use plastic bags and branded a traitor if you don't do whatever you can to minimize the impact of your daily commute to work on the climate. Ride a bike, corporate whore!

Apparently even Disney has gotten the message and cares about the environment now (and also apparently, Disney makes documentaries too). So to celebrate the nation's most important holiday, Earth Day, the studio that owns Pixar has decided to re-release "Earth," a 2007 BBC documentary that repackaged footage from its landmark TV series, "Planet Earth."

So "Earth" is literally nothing new for fans of the famed series. Nearly everything here is culled from the show. But recycled footage or not, "Planet Earth" is still a criminally under-viewed achievement, so the secondhand nature of "Earth" doesn't present a problem. The repackaging is so complete it should be hard for even die-hard "Planet Earth" fans to realize they have seen this all before. The majestic panorama and slow-motion captures of "Planet Earth" have begged for the big screen all along.

There are a few differences of course, chief amongst which is, this being Disney, debonair Englishman Patrick Stewart has been replaced as narrator by American vocal icon James Earl Jones. It's a great choice, as there is something undeniably subversive and fitting about having Darth Vader voice a cautionary tale about the planet.

And obviously, where the TV show took a factual, exhaustive approach to its topics, "Earth" adopts a decidedly more cinematic approach and interweaves the story arcs of three different "families" of animals -- polar bears, elephants and humpback whales -- dealing with the harsh realities of nature and migration, particularly in a globally warmed world.

"Earth" deftly avoids any political overtones and goes light on the preaching and heavy on the viewable facts: the polar bears have no ice to hunt on, the elephants have no water to drink and the humpbacks have nothing to eat.

Along the way is some truly extraordinary footage. We see a pride of lions' night attack on an elephant, a wolf chase, a flock of birds' attempt to fly over the Himalayas and the elephants' crazed attempt to pass through a dust storm. Nearly every sequence will make you think, "Now how the hell did they film that?" and re-enforce the big screen's vast superiority to the small one.

Rarely boring and never too cutesy, "Earth" makes the best of its pared down nature compared to the sprawling TV show and should help keep the environmental drum beating for the foreseeable future. And thanks to its extraordinary subjects and their heartbreaking stories, it's a pretty entertaining movie too.