Earth

I was in such a good mood after 17 Again that I decided to make it a double feature, something I hadn't done in months, possibly since coming back from New York. Right after the movie ended, I went out into the outer lobby and perused the listings. Earth was beginning in just a few minutes. A nature film seemed like the perfect follow-up, so I bought a ticket and went back inside the theater.

As I just now learned from IMDb, this movie, which was co-produced by the BBC and the Discovery Channel, was actually released two years ago in Europe, but is now showing as a feature in the United States, having been released on Earth Day a few weeks ago.

Its current distribution is under the Disneynature imprimatur. The distribution tag on the beginning of the movie starts with what looks like the familiar dark outline of Sleeping Beauty's Castle, but when it lights up, it turns out to be an jagged mountain---cool!

It reminded me of when I was ten years old and went to see a double feature at the Mall Theaters in my hometown in Iowa. The two movies then were The Living Desert and the The Vanishing Prairie. At the time I thought it was just one movie, but they are actually two different Disney films.

As it happens, they had been made over twenty years before I saw them, and won Walt Disney back-to-back Oscars for Best Documentary Feature in 1953 and 1954 respectively. Gee, and I thought they were just cool nature films with a conservationist slant. One of the things about going to movies as a kid is that the ones that stick in your memory vividly are sometimes the ones that adults wouldn't even go so see.

Even though Earth was not a Disney production per se, it fit right in line with those spectacular features that Walt produced over fifty years ago. For one thing, the movie is all nature. Until the closing credits, there are no human beings at all in the entire movie, just wilderness landscapes and animals, lots of animals.

Moreover, the cinematography is incredible. Did I say incredible? That's not strong enough a word. Mind-blowing is perhaps more fitting a description. Some of the most striking shots are of massive groupings of animals, for example, birds in flight filling the screen. There are also the first-ever aerial shots of Mt. Everest to appear in a feature, having been photographed from a Nepalese spy plane.

The Disney trailers for this movie emphasized that the movie follows the "stories" of three animal "families" throughout the year. That's probably stretching it a bit---most of the movie isn't about these families, and it really only checks in on them every now and again. But it's enough to live up to the promotion, which is a good thing, since following the families too closely would have cheated us out of so many other great sequences.

One thing that struck me about this movie was that the producers pulled no punches at all when it came to showing the circle of life, a fact that was underscored by having James Earl Jones as narrator, and having him actually mention "the circle of life."

But this is not The Lion King. Animals get eaten. They don't show blood and gore, but you get to see predators actually catching their prey on multiple occasions. In fact, the predators seem to win almost every show down. Is that spoiling things too much? Perhaps so. In any case, although I was willing to recommend this for my ten-year-old nephew, I would be more hesitant to recommend it for my three-year-old nieces, who watched The Lion King, say, about fifty times during my stay with them.

Perhaps the greatest irony about this movie is that I now see films with no human beings in them in a completely different light. As marvelous and praiseworthy as this movie was, the complete absence of human beings in it inevitably made me think of how the world environmental movement has been, at the internationalist level, hijacked by elite neo-eugenicists (like this sociopath) who openly desire to reduce the world's human population drastically, and to turn much of the planet back over to the wild, like a giant nature preserve.

At one time in my life, this would have seemed like a good thing. Now I see this as the epitome of evil. I certainly don't want to slander the producers of this marvelous film without evidence, but it is always worth remembering that the Nazis were great environmentalists (just read this).

Walt would have never stood for such things. He was on the side of good, of humanity, and yes, of the Earth. I assume this movie is too.