David Attenborough has been to more continents than your passport has pages.
At 93, David Attenborough delivers his most urgent broadcast yet: Earth is in crisis, and he’s got the receipts.
“David Attenbourough: A Life on Our Planet” is a bit like “The Biggest Little Farm” (which I ranked 100 out of 100!) meets “An Inconvenient Truth” (92/100).
Trailer for “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet”
Watch “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet”
You can watch “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet” on Netflix at https://www.netflix.com/title/80216393
Ratings:
- My Rating: 96/100
- IMDB Rating: /10
- Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: /100 (Users); /100 (Critics)
Director’s Note — Alastair Fothergill and Jonnie Hughes direct this 83-minute documentary. Fothergill is known for “Planet Earth,” “Blue Planet,” “Frozen Planet,” and “The Hunt.”
Hughes, a frequent collaborator of David Attenborough, also co-directed “The Green Planet” and “The Earthshot Prize: Repairing Our Planet.”
Of course, the face and voice of this film is 93-year-old Sir David Attenborough himself.
Release Date: September 28, 2020 (Netflix); premiered earlier on September 28, 2020 at the Robert Albert Hall in London.
My Review of “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet”
The Setup
This isn’t just another nature documentary narrated by Attenborough. This is his personal obituary for the natural world—his “witness statement.”
At 93, Attenborough walks us through his 60-year career and lays bare how drastically Earth’s biodiversity has declined during his lifetime.
You Can’t Make This Sh*t Up
- In 1937, when Attenborough was 11, the world had 66% of its wilderness left. As of 2020, it’s just 35%.
- The global population in 1937 was 2.3 billion. By 2020? 7.8 billion. That’s nearly 3.5x growth in a single lifetime.
More Highlights from the Doc
- The film opens in Chernobyl—Attenborough uses the nuclear disaster zone as a metaphor for what unchecked human impact can do to ecosystems.
- The film provides shocking before-and-after satellite images showing how the Borneo rainforest was reduced to palm oil plantations during Attenborough’s career.
- A heartbreaking scene shows the last two northern white rhinos on Earth—mother and daughter—with armed guards protecting them 24/7 from poachers.
- The footage of orangutans in disappearing forests and whales tangled in plastic waste is brutally effective.
- One-third of coral reefs are already gone. If carbon emissions don’t decline fast, nearly all will be gone by 2100.
- The planet has lost over half its rainforests in under a century, mostly to agriculture.
Lesser-Known Details from the Doc
- Japan gets a surprising spotlight: in the 1960s, they had a serious population issue. Through education and economic changes, they stabilized their birth rate without coercive measures. The film points to this as a hopeful model.
- The Netherlands is highlighted for using vertical farming and hydroponics to become one of the world’s top food exporters—despite being tiny and densely populated.
- There’s a brief but powerful segment on the Serengeti’s trophic cascade, showing how apex predators keep ecosystems balanced—a nod to the complex interdependence most humans overlook.
- The filmmakers track down actual footage of Attenborough with mountain gorillas from his landmark 1979 “Life on Earth” series, juxtaposing it with current footage of the same location.
- The film uses “population clock” graphics showing that Earth’s human population has tripled during Attenborough’s lifetime, from 2.3 billion to 7.8 billion. Attenborough admits personal regret about not speaking more forcefully about environmental decline decades earlier when he first noticed it. The final sequence reveals that wild animal populations have declined by 60% since Attenborough began broadcasting.
- The film ends in Chernobyl again—nature has returned, with wolves, deer, and wild horses thriving in the human-free zone.
Wrap Up
“David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet” might be his most personal and urgent work yet. Watch it as a farewell, but also as a challenge—because he’s handing the planet off to us.
Thanks for reading!
Rob Kelly, Chief Maniac, Daily Doc