PLANET EARTH: CAVES / DESERTS / ICE WORLDS - DVD review

Back in the early 1990s when I had just reached my teen years, my eyes caught a television commercial advertising a set of videotapes being offered by Time Life. The collection, "The Trials of Life," was a wildlife series narrated by Sir David Attenborough, and covered in great detail the behavior of animals. The show was unlike anything I had ever seen, and I clearly remember being enthralled with the awesome images of killer whales sliding ashore, snatching misguided seals right off the beach, and then retreating into the shallows to toss the poor creatures around in a ritualistic pre-meal workout. Needless to say, the ad did its job and thankfully, my mother ordered the set for me right on the spot.

Since then, Attenborough has had a hand in a vast number of nature projects, including lending his charismatic British voice to the award-winning "The Blue Planet," but the crown-jewel of them all has to be the critically-acclaimed documentary series that gets up close and personal with our terrestrial world like never before: "Planet Earth."

Five years in the making, "Planet Earth" immediately grabs viewers' attention during the first few frames as we trek across the globe and take the time to smell the roses at each of the Earth's natural habitats. Every chapter in the series showcases one of these biomes in all of its glory, and uses some of the most outstanding footage ever caught on film. This particular disc, "Planet Earth: Caves / Deserts / Ice Worlds," contains episodes four through six of the groundbreaking series.

The first installment on the DVD, "Caves," sheds new light on Earth's most untouched and unexplored ecosystem. Every year, hundreds of miles of virgin cave systems are discovered, and making their home in these dark and damp places are a variety of extraordinary species. Three million wrinkle-lipped bats flourish in Borneo's Deer Cave, and a certain kind of fish called the Shortfin Molly actually thrives in the streams of sulfuric acid flowing through Mexico's Cueva de Villa Luz. Mexico also holds the current record for having the world's deepest pit called the Cave of Swallows, a location that is deep enough to allow skydivers to freefall to the bottom and could completely engulf New York's Empire State Building. The episode wraps up in the United States exploring a section of the Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico, which has become Earth's natural Fortress of Solitude. Over the course of millions of years, seeping sulfuric acid reacting with the calcite in the limestone forged enormous branchlike crystals, sometimes as large as six-meters, jutting from the walls and ceiling in a rarely seen cavern aptly named the Chandelier Ballroom.

From there, we travel across many of the world's "Deserts," such as the Sahara and the Gobi, and this episode is a great example of how educational the series can be. I've always wondered how mammals like the kangaroo are able to survive the blistering heat of the Australian outback, and how plants and animals still manage to live in areas with very little to no water. I thought it was really well done and very respectable that important questions such as these were actually answered, rather than just propping up a camera somewhere to film animals going about their daily business.

The third and final episode on the disc cools things down again with "Ice Worlds," taking the viewer on a chilly journey to the North and South Poles of our planet. This episode uses a slightly different angle from the previous two, with a primary focus centering on the lifecycles of penguins and polar bears. Of course there are heartwarming shots of adorable hatchling penguins stumbling around on the ice and a pair of polar bear cubs emerging from their den with their mother in the springtime, but there's also a few tragic insights, too. Sad moments like a hungry polar bear on the losing end of a vicious battle with a walrus, and young lost penguins slowly freezing to death.

Again, I can't stress enough the absolutely phenomenal camerawork in the series, not just the amazing close-up footage of bizarre-looking animals, but also the simply gorgeous and relaxing landscapes. Think of it this way, the photography is so unreal that you can actually pick up your remote control and press the pause button at virtually any point during an episode and be left with a freeze-frame worthy of mounting in an art gallery.

"Planet Earth" also makes fantastic use of time-lapse photography to capture some of nature's wonders that are invisible to the naked eye. Watching the girth of a cactus plant slowly expanding as it absorbed moisture after a rainfall was certainly striking, but the most dramatic for me was in Antarctica, as seeing how a couple of miles of the sea freezes over in the span of 24 hours during the winter was a marvel in itself.

Video:
The video for "Planet Earth" fills television screens with an anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio of 1.85:1, and the picture quality is easily among the best I've ever seen for a standard DVD release. The varying black levels during the night filming and deep within caverns are sharp and strong, and I didn't notice any grain that often plagues these types of scenes. The bright colors are the most vivid attention-grabber though, and the detail throughout the series is simply stunning. I could see the shine on the scales on the rainbow flat lizards and make out the individual hairs on the coats of the Nubian ibex. Barring high-definition formats, it just doesn't get any better than this.

Audio:
Complementing the spectacular visuals, "Planet Earth" features Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound with optional English, French, and Spanish subtitles. Attenborough's narration can be heard with clarity throughout each episode, and the sounds of wildlife teleports the viewer firmly into each of the ecosystems to complete the experience of a lifetime. I particularly noticed the impressive sound when a billion migrating locusts swarmed the screen, and the droning murmuration from their wings creepily came at me from all sides and put my couch smack-dab in the middle of the plaguing infestation.

Extras:
Technically, there are three bonus 10-minute featurettes hidden behind each of the episodes titled, "Planet Earth Diaries," although I couldn't find any option to select them separately and actually found them by chance using the "Play All" selector. Preferably, the diary entries would have been listed on the menu screen for quick and easy reference, but I'm positive they aren't even included in the high-definition releases so at least they're here on the DVD.

Each diary is a behind-the-scenes tour for a certain section their corresponding episode, and they are just as entertaining to watch as the shows. In "Caves," we get to see the crew getting down and dirty with cockroaches, and that's putting it mildly, to film the massive mounds of bat guano in Borneo's Gomantong Cave. I was amazed how the photographers spent upwards of two months in the middle of nowhere to track down the endangered Bactrian camels in Mongolia's barren Gobi Desert, forced to bring along their own stash of car parts and mechanics just in case of a vehicle breakdown. For over a year, the cameramen endured the bitter cold to get the remarkable footage of a giant mass of male emperor penguins huddled together to keep themselves and their eggs warm. I couldn't believe what the crew put themselves through for the documentary, and they deserve a lot of appreciation for how dedicated they were to deliver accurate and fascinating cinematography.

The Final Cut:
"Planet Earth: Caves / Deserts / Ice Worlds" is without a doubt a fascinating standalone DVD release, but looking at the bigger picture it really contains just a small taste of a much more extravagant feast. I would strongly recommend checking out "Planet Earth: The Complete Collection," gathering the entire eleven-episode run of an unforgettable masterpiece that truly belongs in every home video library.