Earth has a neat, shapely structure. It opens and closes on the plight of a male polar bear and – in between – journeys from first day of sunshine at the North Pole to last day of sunshine at the South Pole. Along the way, it shows us a dazzling assortment of animal life. But this focus on that polar bear – amusingly referred to repeatedly as the “father” polar bear as if he still has any concern for the mommy and two baby polar bears – makes the movie a fitting sequel to Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
Strategically opening on Earth Day, Earth wears its agenda on its sleeve. One of the most striking and memorable images in Gore’s movie was an animation of a polar bear struggling for survival. With global climate change causing the ice cover – a crucial platform for hunting seals – to melt away more quickly each year, polar bears have less and less time to make a kill and replenish their body weight before the melt leaves them swimming in a vast ocean in exhaustion. A polar bear, tired and drowning, makes for a galvanizing image, especially in a child’s mind. That image has haunted my children for more than a year since watching An Inconvenient Truth.
There’s plenty in Earth for adults. There are time lapse shots of changing seasons that left me wondering just how they were accomplished. They look as if nature had decided to stage a special truncated performance just for the cameras. I’ve seen a lot of time-lapse in my day, but the way this incorporates camera movements holds a gracefulness that is eye-popping. There is also a powerful sequence of cranes struggling to migrate against the howling winds over the peaks of Mt. Everest. It is fierce and suspenseful. It is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. (I’ve since learned that, aided by special access to a Nepalese Army spy plane, this is the first such Mt. Everest footage ever shot.)
Earth is primarily, though, a movie for kids. As I already alluded, it uses the classic Disney movie technique of humanizing animals, forming them into daddy, mommy, and baby family units and comparing misbehaving baby animals to misbehaving young children. And it serves the film well; the children in the audience were definitely wrapped up in the plights of the characters. They were audibly gasping and one child voiced great concern when a wolf chased down and caught a young caribou. “Did the wolf get him? Mommy, when is the movie going to be over?”
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