Planet Earth: The Complete Collection (Blu-ray)

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What do you do after you spend five years filming a nature documentary that wins a pair of Oscars for cinematography and music?

If you're Alastair Fothergill and you're working for BBC and the Discovery Channel, you dive right back into the deep end of the nature pool and spend five more years crafting an 11-episode sequel.

It took 40 camera teams all five of those years to shoot at 200 different locations scattered across "Planet Earth," and those locations weren't just randomly chosen. The emphasis for this series is on the superlative. Among other things, we witness the largest animal migration on the planet (caribou), watch the largest land carnivore (polar bear) do his thing, see the oldest organism on the planet (bristle cone pines), visit the largest natural cave in the world (Borneo) with its three million bats, check out the least explored of all our jungles (Congo), witness the greatest seasonal change on our planet (Antarctica), experience the coldest conditions (Artic), explore the largest unbroken stream of rainforest in the world (Amazon), and see time-lapse photography of the most extreme and quick-turnover recycling (decaying matter in the Amazon rainforest) in the world.

Whether the cameras are following the animals or panning great vistas, the emphasis for this series is on the extreme. And that includes extreme beauty.

"Planet Earth" was directed, filmed, and set to music by the same folks that gave us "The Blue Planet," which won Academy Awards for cinematography and music. This sequel also won those two categories, as well as statues for sound editing and (the big one) Outstanding Nonfiction Series.

If you've seen "The Blue Planet," you already know the style of filming. It's just the locations and subject matter that are different. Once again, David Attenborough narrates as we journey across the planet to witness things that few people see--many of them photographed for the first time. This series makes explorers of us all! So much so, that you can't help but wish that Lewis and Clark had a HD video camera with them as they made their journey from Pittsburgh to the Pacific, or that Darwin had one with him on the Beagle as he explored Earth's southern hemisphere. "Planet Earth" may entertain and inform us now, but you can't help but think what an important record this is for future generations.

And it looks fantastic in Blu-ray.

Then again, if you watched this show in HD when it was broadcast, you already know that--just as you know Fothergill's style by now. Like Ken Burns, he has his go-to bag of camera tricks. Fothergill is particularly fond of sped-up time lapse photography to show rapid change in a place, and we see seasons rotating, and sedentary or slow-growing organisms engaged in what would appear to be frenetic movement. There are also a large number of panoramic shots--many of them aerial--with the camera panning across a grand landscape in even grander style, supported, once more, by George Fenton's original music. But there are also extreme close-ups here, and plenty of them, as well as infra-red night photography and visuals that show what animals perceive with their heat sensors.

In many respects, "Planet Earth" shows just how far nature photography has come. It's the best I've seen, and the cameras go places no one has gone before. Yet, in some ways "Planet Earth" reminds us that nature documentaries haven't really changed all that much. The first of Disney's "True-Life Adventures" series, "Beaver Valley," was filmed way back in 1950, but it set a precedent for teaching us about animals by telling a story and by treating the animals as if they were human. And since zoologist Marlin Perkins began teaching back in 1963 when "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" brought nature into America's living rooms, nature films have been concerned with ecology and conservation. So in a way, nature filming hasn't changed at all. There are still kill-or-be-killed dramas, still reminders that the animals' habitats are threatened by the collectively gigantic human footprint we leave on the planet, and still attempts to bring us so close to the animals that we begin to feel their warmth and equal right to exist.

Like Disney's early series, which was organized partly on the basis of different terrains and habitats, "Planet Earth" takes us "From Pole to Pole" in one episode, then focuses on "Mountains," "Fresh Water," "Caves," "Desserts," "Ice Worlds," "Great Plains," "Jungles," "Shallow Seas," "Seasonal Forests," and "Ocean Deep." Many viewers will have favorite episodes, but for me, there are favorite moments--sequences that are so awesome and delightful that you think to yourself, I can't believe they filmed this . . . and that I'm SEEING it.