Greatest suicide mission ever!
Not everything we watch touches us. Being blessed beings with active optical nerves, we see a lot around us but very few of those visuals stick to the back of our head and stay there for a considerable amount of time. Particularly in this era of binge-watching where completing a number of episodes is of prime significance as we find ourselves deluged by too much content and hence waddle hopelessly from one product to another. I must confess though I am, sometimes, more concerned about finishing a series than actually immersing myself in it. Which is also the reason why a tiny minority of excellent shows exist. Most are also-ran from the production line.
Our Planet (2019) clearly doesn’t fall in this complacent category. While describing it, the word ‘magnificent’ doesn’t even cut it.
Narrated by David Attenborough — no, there is no need whatsoever to mention his knighthood; when was the last time you used Bharat Ratna before mentioning Sachin Tendulkar? — each episode is a stark reminder of what’s going wrong with Earth. Or to present more succinctly, how exactly are we fucking up this place? And when Attenborough tells you something, you ought to believe because his conclusions arrive from a place habituated by truth, knowledge and concern. He has walked the walk and earned the rostrum to talk the talk. His decades-long body of work remind us that it’s possible to dedicate oneself to the quest of getting intimate with nature. And more importantly, technical know-how remains inadequate as time fills the gap as we move on. Could you have imagined back in the 1970s that we’d be using cameras that can capture the borders of a thumb-ish fish’s scales?
However, through the eight fascinating — OK, this adjective doesn’t cut it either — episodes, we learn more and more how human activities (read: greed, mostly) has messed up the ecosystem and brought horror on all creatures indiscriminately. Everybody, from the polar bears in the north to penguins in the south to caimans in the west to the tigers in the east, is badly affected by the climate change that we are solely responsible for. It’s worth wondering how many trees will we have to plant to redeem ourselves for the kind of waste we produce daily, be it while hailing a cab or ordering in food covered by single-use plastic. There is seemingly no escape from this rotting rut.
Yet, on the other hand, here’s a thought that might soothe you: we are doing this to ourselves because the planet wants to get rid of us. And the only way possible is to make Earth hostile enough for us to consider the visionary leaps of Elon Musk. Maybe, pretty maybe, the world is dying as an excuse to recreate itself. The blood that we’ve spilled—religious nuts tend to pretend that human history reeks of flowers—and the filth that we’ve spread over the centuries can’t be washed clean, not even by all the water in all the oceans. Which brings us to the plot twist of this ongoing travesty: the planet doesn’t need to be saved. She is a big girl and can take care of herself. She has been around for longer than time. It’s our ass that is on fire and the least we can do is exit the stage with grace and gratitude.
