Shot at various locations worldwide over the span of five years, Earth features images never-before-seen (unless you've already seen Planet Earth). Using the latest technologies and a huge number of cameramen and crew, the sheer immensity of the project is very impressive. Some of the images shown are, in a word, amazing. As mentioned earlier, this is a pared-down version of Planet Earth, so if you have already been privy to the series, you will not see any new footage in this movie. The only thing new is the editing and the narration, which, if you were unfortunately subjugated to the US version of the series, is a quite the upgrade. Jones comes through with feeling, humor and intensity. I will not fault him for the script writing, the quality of which is far beneath that of the actual film. I'm sure the children watching Earth will enjoy hearing Mufasa once again talking about the circle of life.
Beautiful scenery aside, the storyline is, well, almost non-existent. Earth was advertised as an adventure following three families of animals in their journey across the planet. While the editing has been done is such a way that these "families" are revisited several times, the intermittent way that these moments intersect the rest of the movie are a bit confusing. Incidentally, I had the same complaint about the US version of Planet Earth, commenting that the filmmakers took a bunch of incredible footage, put it together in to a remarkable series, and then wrote a script to fit, taking some extreme creative licenses along the way. The same holds true for Earth, although I do believe that they did a somewhat better job this time around.
The package includes a couple of special features. There is the ever-present director's commentary, called "filmmakers annotations" in Earth. While I do not usually partake of this feature in my normal movie viewing, I did watch the movie again with this enabled and found the behind-the-scenes anecdotes well worth the time. There is also a stand-alone "making-of" feature which provides other insights into the making of Earth. One of the more interesting features to me is the Living Menu, which shows a globe that has "hotspots" in various places. These hotspots include little notes about what is going on in various parts of the world and they change from month to month, providing an interesting bit of trivia when viewing the movie multiple times. All criticism of the scripting and lack of scientific information aside, there is no doubt that this footage is some of the most awe-inspiring ever before captured on film. For those without the time or desire to view the series in its entirety, or for the children without the attention span to do so, Earth is a fine addition to your Blu-ray collection. Even now, three years after the initial release of Planet Earth, this landmark of film-making achievement is still truly awesome to behold.
