The Netflix series 'Alien Worlds' is like 'Planet Earth' plus CGI aliens - Chron

Who among us has not sprawled out on an ancient-looking couch, eyes glazed, watching a scratched “Planet Earth” DVD from start to finish?

In the 15 years since “Planet Earth” debuted on the BBC, we’ve been treated to “Cosmos” in high definition, plus macro views of every member of the animal kingdom imaginable, plus Zac Efron’s stomach muscles. There’s even a nature show in pitch dark! Each is truly a modern marvel, but if you feel anything like me, the whole genre has started to feel a little… stale.

Let’s breeze past the part of the essay about how sad it is that I’ve become immune to God-like technology that allows us to see close-up views of insects and just get to the good news: Netflix has turned the nature documentary genre upside-down with their new show “Alien Worlds.”

Sure, it shows macro footage of ant soldiers tearing apart spiders that we’ve grown accustomed to, and it visits the hottest place on our home planet — the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia — which genuinely looks like a sci-fi landscape. But what makes this series different is that after explaining more about the real, alien-looking landscape, the narrator zooms out to an imagined CGI planet called Janus that is half desert, half frozen shadowland. To be clear, Janus is not real, but the stoic narrator treats it as such, extrapolating scientific concepts to a fictional planet populated by five-legged, ten-eyed “pentapods” that look like the offspring of a “Starship Troopers” bug and a vase from “That '70s Show.”

The crux of nature documentaries, or maybe the boon if you’re a fan of ambient TV, is that it's so easy to zone out while watching. It’s great eye candy, but once you’ve visited the Jolly Ranchers buffet (that I just made up) enough times, it’s gonna take a mutant candied apple to make you go back for more.

“Alien Worlds” is that freak food. Nearly every time it unveiled a new creature I audibly gasped, the only time a TV show has done that to me this entire year aside from “The Undoing” when [NAME REDACTED] finds [POTENTIAL MURDER WEAPON REDACTED] while wearing a very nice [CLOTHING REDACTED BUT IT WAS PROBABLY A COAT].

The locations and creatures conceived in “Alien Worlds” are like a video game designer’s wet dream. If I were Disney, I would be on the phone licensing every one of these creatures into a new “Star Wars” show about a Dagobah zookeeper, or at least as pets for Lando or Obi-Wan or Andor or Ahsoka. On the planet Atlas, little flying green blimp insects empty their air sacs, then dive-bomb onto their prey like falcons. On Eden, twin stars pump twice as much oxygen into the atmosphere, turning the planet’s foliage pink and making the forest look like a black light poster. Cute six-limbed monkeys bound from neon tree to neon tree, then (spoiler alert) those cuddly aliens shoot extra arms out of their torsos like grappling hooks to kill some other adorable aliens for dinner.

Theoretically, these CGI scenes are the spoonful of sugar that helps the learning go down. Each alien creature serves as an extension of the real-life animal adaptations shown in the scenes, be it how the hive mind behavior of ants could be applied to colonization of a new planet, or how the intense oxygen intake that allows hummingbirds to move so quickly could supercharge those monkey predators.

Granted, if you are like me, you will likely peek at your phone during the earthly investigations of scorpion venom and meerkats. They are fascinating and visually impressive, but I have literally been watching documentaries about meerkats since 4th grade, and also social media has turned my attention span to dust. And that’s what makes the format of “Alien Worlds” so delightful. Half of each 40-minute episode is nice and educational and does not really demand your full attention ... then the sci-fi section pulls you back.

It’s an ideal mix of passive and active viewing, and despite my emphasis on the six-limbed monkeys, I did take away a couple cool power facts about scorpions and fungi and the hottest place on Earth, even if I was really just there for the pentapods.

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https://www.chron.com/tv/article/netflix-alien-worlds-nature-documentary-cgi-15789095.php

2020-12-12 12:08:39Z
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