Our Planet is a 3-disc DVD collection that comprises of three separate feature-length History Channel specials. Though different in topics, the three are collected together because each documentary represents Past, Present or Future of Earth. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the present and the future are also considered history by this ever-expanding cable channel.
How the Earth was Made gives us a history of Earth’s past: a CGI-assisted visualization of the billions of years it took for an unlivable terrain to become the rock we live on today. This is the original doc that predates the more in-depth television series, focusing on the timeline rather than specific geological features.
A Global Warning? focuses on, you’ve guessed it, climate change. It actually offers a lot of information already mentioned in How the Earth was Made (hey, that’s history!), but using them in the context of showing Earth’s cyclical climate to consider current climate conditions as a warning of things to come. Global warming continues to be a debated topic, and this special has the opportunity to be just a clinical look at how the Earth has been heating up fast in the last century; but citing a consensus among scientists, it argues decisively that people are in fact to blame for it.
Life After People, like the case with How the Earth was Made, is the 90-minute doc that served as the pilot for the series of the same name. It again covers the linear timeline of Earth’s future, rather than the series’ approach of exploring specific incidents in each episode. This “future” part of the set easily acts as the most entertaining of the three, because it deals with apocalyptic visuals (tigers roam the White House lawn! Bears on Wall Street!) and enters the realm of speculative fiction. It does require the audience to accept the impossible premise of an unsaid factor causing the human race to disappear that doesn’t affect animals and infrastructures. So basically a scientific exploration of the Rapture, which sounds like an oxymoron.
While it’s not exactly the collection’s fault that the three documentaries don’t connect from one to the other, since they were produced independent of one another, it’s still slightly disappointing that there’s no continuity to this set. One is a history lesson, one is a cautionary prodding, and one is a fun what-if diversion. It makes it pretty clear that it’s just a quick slap-together of three documentaries they had available, which were already available individually anyway (and on Blu-ray, to boot). Add to that the annoying full screen letterbox presentation, it’s hard to recommend this purchase as anything but a convenient grade school tool. History Channel aficionados would do better to get the season box sets of each series instead.
DVD Bonus Features
There is a “bonus” documentary included, Inside the Volcano. It’s no less interesting or shorter than the other three, featuring some rather breathtaking visuals of the inner-workings of a live volcano, but because it doesn’t fit into the past-present-future trilogy of Earth concept, it’s treated as the stepchild in the collection.
"Our Planet: The Past, Present and Future of Earth" is on sale March 29, 2011 and is rated PG. Documentary.
