When I first watched Life On Our Planet, I was initially disappointed, like many of you probably were. A little was left to be desired - and still is, don't get me wrong.
However, after months of reflecting and reading Life On Our Planet literature, I have come to gain respect for the show in general.
One of the most common complaints from those who reviewed Life On Our Planet was its lack of prehistoric animals proportionate to extant species. This was never really one of my founded issues. In my opinion, prehistoric and modern animals should not be so regularly segregated in the media, as if all in either "category" represent distinct faunal assemblages. They are all descendants of LUCA, all fight their own survival struggles, and shared this planet's ecosystems - regardless of whether they existed only in the last 0.001% of Life's history.
Reflecting the past with the present is okay to me. Besides, the show is more often at its best in the modern segments.
I don't think of Life On Our Planet as a paleo doc, generally.
The MUSIC 🎶 is absolutely gorgeous. I often listen to Lorne Balfe's full Life On Our Planet soundtrack, and it is amazing and helpful every time. He makes use of essentially 3 notes to make an exceptional tune. Anže Rozman and Kara Talve's Prehistoric Planet album is still higher on my favorites list - as is the series itself. I do often find myself, [trying] to hum Life On Our Planet tunes, though, so that says enough.
The soundtrack is diverse and captivating, especially in montage sequences.
Many of the modern-day featurettes were quite exceptional. In particular for me, the Fabian lizard skirmish in the Atacama, the scarab beetle pollinating the water lily, and butterfly evolution.
Life On Our Planet could have benefited significantly from an erasal of the word 'dynasty' from the screenwriters' vocabulary. The photography is amazing, but the asserted narrative of Earth as a battlefield for warring animals is anything but. If one were to watch solely the sights and sounds of the sequences, modern and ancient, none of that is even to be found!
Animals will fight to survive, not to coup anybody but their own.
Even some extant scenes, like that of the Komodo dragon, I feel were spoiled by trying to insist to the audience that this was happening here when it clearly wasn't.
And Morgan Freeman was a great narrator for the most part! It's unfortunate that he got handed a script that was, in some places, written on shoots.
My favorite episode as a whole was the final one. Bar the revolting cave lion hunt, I feel it was a great summary of the the conclusion to Life's story thus-far. Humans disperse, seemingly so sudden, and reshape the world at a global scale. The hopeful vision of our future is refreshing and closed the series delicately.
On the other side of the episode lost, "The Rules of Life" was atrocious (as a whole, not accounting for individual scenes). It was incoherent and perfectly paved the way for a terrible narrative. It would have done Silverback Films well to cut it and focus more on Palaeozoic life.
With the prehistoric animals, some depictions are great and some are not so, as many of you can probably agree. Arthropleura mating, Inostrancevia's introduction, the one-way interaction between Smilodon populator and Doedicurus, even the Megacerops frolicking. There were indeed stunning and inspiring vignettes.
A smaller YouTuber of whom I can't recall the name made an excellent point in what I think is the most thoughtful Life On Our Planet review. Prehistoric Planet excelled in its animal designs in that the reconstructions themselves weren't made to be implicitly scary or "awesomebro", but could be if the situation called for it. Basically, they could be seen as majestic, charming, or scary depending on the setting.
Life On Our Planet designers failed to do this in many cases, and as a result, Allosaurus, the terror bird, and others are shown downright inaccurate, for the same of "impressifying" them. The terror bird is just inferior to the sabertoothed cat, anyway, so I suppose it doesn't matter, right?
Another upside of the show was its mostly accurate portrayal of extinction events. Sadly, the Triassic/Jurassic was skipped along with most of the non-dinosaurian Triassic reptiles.
I feel like the series tells in some ways an incomplete story of life on our planet. However, I do appreciate that they noted some significant innovations in prehistory rather than ditching them for the resident megafauna. In the Shadow of Giants, while sadly not showing awesome Yixian flora, had a beautiful segment on the development of flowers and insect pollination, rather than showing dinosaurs the entire time. I would like to see more dinosaurs still, though - and not cheap copies like in Edmontosaurus's case.
As an epic 7-part series (1st episode not count) exploring the diversity of the major vertebrate groups and unavoidable "background" aspects of our interconnected, living world, it is a respectable near-masterpiece.
Hopefully, Surviving Earth will come to be even more thorough and stunning and show what was overlooked previously in the known story of Life's odyssey.
