There’s a grace and dignity to Welcome to Earth, the Will Smith hosted six-hour love letter to our blue planet, that transcends the usual celebrity-driven guided tour through the world’s wild places.
Scientists, adventurers and career explorers — many of them persons of colour who’ve overcome personal travails and handicaps to achieve their collective dream of exploring the darkest, most hidden reaches of planet Earth — guide Smith up the sides of active volcanoes, surrounded by deadly clouds of ash that both create and can take life in the blink of an eye; and down to the bottom of the sea, from Bio Bay, Puerto Rico to Bimini in the Bahamas.
“We set out to find a hidden world in the depths,” Smith explains in the second episode in the series, Descent Into Darkness, “and I discovered that there’s more light in the darkness than I ever imagined.”
We, too.
Smith is in safe hands, despite his assertion at the outset that, when he was a child, his grandmother warned him that all the best things in life are lived “on the other side of fear.”
If that set-up sounds suspiciously contrived — Smith is never going to be in real danger, and we know that — it doesn’t matter: What emerges is a sense of wonder and an innate curiosity about the things in nature that really matter, things we don’t know and yet we somehow take for granted.
The program, a more disciplined, better focused and more meaningful follow-up to 2018’s One Strange Rock is produced by National Geographic for Disney+, together with former BBC and Discovery executive Jane Root and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — includes looks at the behaviour of large groups of animals when they come together, such as the annual Serengeti wildebeest migration across Africa’s Great Rift Valley; the power of scent and smell, and how certain scents link ecosystems around the world; and the nature of movement and how everything in life is a study in motion, from life on Earth to Earth itself, and the cosmos beyond.
Welcome to Earth was filmed in 34 countries on all seven continents, and it shows: from Tanna in the South Pacific to Öran in Sweden, from Hanifaru Bay’s Baa Atoll in the Indian Ocean Maldives to Vatnajökull Glacier in Iceland.
This is no idle travelogue, but neither is it a scold about how the natural world is going to hell in a hand-basket and it’s all your fault.
The tone is light-hearted and yet weighty in content. Somehow the balance works. It’s easy to imagine how many ways Welcome to Earth could have gone wrong, and yet the threads hold together in the end.
It’s easy to listen to and emboldening to watch. This is nature programming of the highest order.
Inevitably, it’s the people who make the strongest impression— and not just Smith but the explorers themselves, whether it’s polar adventurer Dwayne Fields talking about how kayaking an ice river looks scary — “but it’s an important step because having the confidence to navigate the dangerous and unfamiliar is at the heart of what is to be an explorer” — or marine biologist and conservation photographer Cristina Mittermeier talking about how sharks use their acute sense of smell — “hundreds of times more potent and accurate than that of humans” — to navigate the vast expanse of the world’s oceans.
Welcome to Earth holds to the promise of its name. It takes viewers to the ends of the Earth, and beyond. These days, that’s a welcome trip indeed.
— Disney+