'Planet Earth II' is packed with wonders, stories and, finally, warnings

By Robert Lloyd, Television Critic

Feb. 17, 2017 12:30 PM PT

“Looking down from two miles above the surface of the Earth, it’s impossible not to be impressed by the sheer grandeur and splendor and power of the natural world,” says David Attenborough at the beginning of “Planet Earth II,” the sequel to his landmark 2006 “Planet Earth.” That globally popular series – the BBC estimates its viewership at half a billion – helped the world feel good about the money it had spent upgrading to high-definition television sets.

It’s also impossible not to be impressed that Attenborough, now 90, is speaking these words from a hot-air balloon high above snow-covered peaks. (It is the last we will see of him, however; he becomes a disembodied narrator thereafter.)

“Today, much has changed,” he says. Now the world can feel good about upgrading to ultra-high-def 4K. The new, seven-part series, which begins Saturday on BBC America, takes advantage of a decade’s advances in camera technology and nature photography to “bring you closer to animals than ever before, and reveal new wildlife dramas for the very first time.”

As in the Disney nature documentaries of old, footage coalesces around narratives one suspects may have been constructed partly in post-production. (That is not to say the science is wrong.) When we cross a river with a swimming pygmy sloth, seen from multiple angles, we might reasonably wonder whether that was a single sloth making a single trip (a sloth booty call). Music cues emphasize the drama or comedy of situations to which those terms don’t properly apply.

Here is how one avian love story is framed. The scene: sub-Antarctic Zavodovski Island. Attenborough: “Here’s a male albatross waiting for his mate.” (They spend six months apart each year, and get back together to breed, as in a Neil Simon play.) “But this year she’s late. Nope, that’s not her…. The clock is ticking…. There are 3 million birds on the island, but only one matters to him. Could this be her? At last…. At first, he’s a little coy. But not for long.” The text is cute, but the birds are lovely. And stories are nice.

Wonders abound. There are Harris’s hawks hunting in packs. Seagoing iguanas. Cliff-walking Nubian ibex. Beetles that gather water from desert fog. Luminous mushrooms, gliding lizards. The Wilson’s bird-of-paradise, clearing leaves so it won’t distract from his own colors. Dolphins in the middle of a jungle. Otters as big as a man. Australia’s great bower bird decorating, and redecorating, his nest with shiny human bric-a-brac – “It’s not easy finding sex in the city,” says Attenborough.

The series is divided environmentally into “Islands,” “Mountains,” “Jungles,” “Deserts,” “Grasslands” and “Cities,” with an extra making-of episode to answer (some of) your questions about how these images were captured. (The BBC Natural History Unit, which also filmed Attenborough’s “Life” series and “Spy in the Wild,” lately airing here as part of the PBS series “Nature,” is without peer.) Certain motifs repeat: finding a mate, teaching the young, finding food, not becoming food. On that last point, as is usual with films like these, there are scenes one might want to watch with eyes half-closed -- although the most frequent outcome of the more nerve-racking passages is a narrow escape, with the predator left to try another day.

There are passing references to climate change and the effect that humans (“the world’s top predator”) have had on the face of the Earth and the survival of everything not human. (“In the last 6,000 years the surface of our planet has undergone a sudden change” is a nicely turned phrase.)

“Animals must cope with the changes or disappear,” says Attenborough, and in the “Cities” episode he shows us leopards in the streets of Mumbai, peregrine falcons soaring among the man-made towers and valleys of New York, spotted hyenas making their well-remembered way to friendly butchers in Ethiopia. And there is the closing, feel-good suggestion, based on the model of Singapore, which is integrating animal-friendly flora into its systems and structures, that wilderness might somehow be brought into the cityscape.

The warnings seem almost an afterthought. And because absolutely everything here is beautiful to behold and the wild lands pictured seem so vast and untrammeled, the overall impression “Planet Earth II” leaves is that things might be more or less fine. This is not where you will learn how many species have disappeared in the last 100 years or how many are expected to go in the next 50. But it will be nice to have these gorgeous pictures when they do. Or maybe it won’t.

‘Planet Earth II’

Where: AMC, BBC America and Sundance

When: 9 p.m. Saturday

Rating: TV-PG-V (may be unsuitable for young children with an advisory for violence)

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Follow Robert Lloyd on Twitter @LATimesTVLloyd

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