On Wednesday, the Netflix platform begins broadcasting the series Life on Our Planet, by American director Steven Spielberg, which deals with the history of life on planet Earth, in 8 episodes, allowing viewers to preview the last 5 stages of mass extinction that the Earth witnessed.
What is narrated in the work, in the voice of actor Morgan Freeman, is that life has always found a way to withstand every disaster it has faced over the course of 4 billion years, starting from the barbaric ice ages and ending with meteorites.
And every time, the species that survive the disasters engage in a battle for dominance, within a pattern of battles similar to what appears in the series Game of Thrones, in which vertebrates and invertebrates or reptiles and mammals face off, instead of the Starks and Lannister (two ruling families in the series).
Executive producer Dan Tapster says, “What we wanted to do from the beginning was to tell the life story in a series, and make the viewer relate to the work. The story is very dramatic, and I hope we have achieved our goal, as this work may be the first of its kind in the field of natural history.”
Aside from the suspenseful endings that stand out in the work, the film shows great tension with a series of lovable and vulnerable creatures that evolve despite the hardships surrounding them, at least for a few hundred million years.
Tapster points out that dealing with Spielberg’s company as the executive producer of the work made it possible to create a series that “contains more emotions and feelings of compassion” than other works about natural history.
The work chooses major species, such as the first fish with a backbone, or the first vertebrate animal to migrate from the ocean to land, and since 99% of the species are extinct, the creators of the work did not have a problem choosing between them. “There are at least a billion extinct species, and we had to limit That number is at 65,” according to Tapster.
But the animals chosen were often unlikely heroes and lucky survivors, such as the bizarre Arandaspis fish, which rose to prominence with the demise of the ocean’s great monsters and reshaped the future of life.
Visual effects supervisor Jonathan Previte says: “Arandaspace fish are nonsense and strange… but they appear in the work because they play a crucial role in development.”
“dominant species”
The series enters the competition in a crowded market, going up against the latest BBC series, David Attenborough’s Planet Earth III, which was also launched this week.
It follows the Apple TV series Planet prehistoric, which is also narrated by Attenborough and uses computer-generated effects to recreate the age of the dinosaurs.
But Life on Our Planet also aims to stand out from the competition; Due to the message it carries with its timing and content, and despite its interest in suspense and plot twists, it ends with the survival of life, and humans at the highest peak of beings.
However, with the sixth mass extinction event already occurring; Because of humanity’s impact on Earth, there is also a profound warning in this work.
“In the five events we’ve seen so far, there’s been one common denominator – the dominant species that went into this extinction never came out,” says series producer Alistair Fothergill.
“We’re making the sixth event, and I think you might think we’re the dominant genre right now,” he adds.
“In a weird way, there’s a message of hope in all of this,” Tapster explains, “because not only is this the first extinction event caused by a species, but we also have the power to stop it.”
