Nature often looks better at a distance. “Planet Earth,” an 11-part mother of all nature series to be shown on the Discovery Channel for five consecutive Sundays, beginning tomorrow night, understands this truth. The BBC, which produced the series with Discovery, used helicopters, long lenses and all manner of cutting-edge film techniques to bring us the photographic spoils of a five-year global odyssey.
Often the filmmakers show Earth in the most flattering light. In Antarctica “the cliff tops are stained pink,” the narrator Sigourney Weaver says, “with the droppings of tens of thousands of nesting penguins.”
Seen from afar, the droppings look lovely. But “Planet Earth” does not always see waste matter through rose-tinted lenses. Close-ups can be equally dramatic.
In a cave in Borneo the camera ranges across what appears to be a moving mountain. This, Ms. Weaver explains, is a 300-foot-high mound of bat droppings, “its surface carpeted with hundreds of thousands of cockroaches.” One would have been enough.
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