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A while ago I watched a film called "Genesis" I actually wrote a review of it here, and gave it a pretty good review. This film is in many ways the same. There are no talking heads, no real human interaction whatsoever, and are just left with the images of our earth and explanations on it's importance.

For the first 25 or so minutes of the film all we see are landscapes, some plant life, but no animals or people. The narrator (Glenn Close) tells us about how the Earth began, where our minerals and metals came from, how the earth created rock and water. Going through the billions of years it took we understand that this is nothing short of a miracle. Not to close to the sun, not to far, but the perfect medium where life can become possible. When they do get to life they don't lavish it with praise, but more a deep interest in the intricacies of how every bit of life has a meaning and a place in the world, nothing is trite or without rhyme and reason. From the smallest bug, to the biggest whale they all fit into the puzzle.

It's at this point that we get to humans, and our mere 200,000 years of existence, and how for only 20,000 years of that have we actually been doing something other than nomadic wanderings never really leaving much of a mark anywhere. Once we settle down, usually near coasts our real genius comes into play, we make boats, we figure out how to use the water to our every advantage, but we live directly off of mother natures bounty. Not really taking more than we need. That was until we discovered the "pockets of sunlight" already here. I'm referring to oil, and coal and all the fossil fuels we take advantage of now. How in the last century we changed the face of the earth 100 fold more than we did in the other 20,000 years of actually doing something here.

From tilling the earth by hand, and creating only what we needed to exist we jumped to being able to make machines that could till the earth for us, and making everything under the sun, useful or not simply because we can. Thinking about the health care debate, and watching the news they were talking about what will the Democrats tackle next? Maybe jobs, or the economy, and as important as those things are I think the more important subjects actually involve our own destruction and the livable world with us. So what's the point of making sure someone has a job if we are all dead?

The doc. is far reaching, it covers many places and a lot of subjects without ever feeling really rushed. perhaps it's because most of the film was shot from a helicopter or a small single engine plane. They use a lot of slo-mo that keeps everything pretty grounded and rather graceful. There were a few problems I had with it, which were minor and simply factual based information they gave which was not true, and it seemed that it was a problem that occurred because of the film being translated. Other things that were said just seemed wrong, but for everything they said that might not have been true there was 100 things they said that are absolutely true.

It is very beautifully told and thankfully ends on a high note. The format that the film was in was marvelous, we never get closer to a person in the film than a few hundred feet, and the only voice we hear is that of the narrators. It's so beautiful and like I said earlier it was graceful. It should really be watched by a lot of people, not just doc. geeks like me. 8.5/10 stars.

Director: Yaan Arthus-Bertrand

Narrator: Glenn Close