Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings, Salvador Dali once said, and Our Great National Parks, Netflix’s visually stirring five-part paean to Earth Day, is nothing if not ambitious. The opening hour, A World of Wonder, narrated and hosted by former US President Barack Obama, tries — and largely succeeds — to show viewers things we have never seen before, no matter how many nature programs we may have seen, from hippos surfing the waves of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Gabon’s Loangu National Park for the sheer fun of it, to white lemurs making death-defying leaps between jagged limestone pinnacles in Madagascar’s remote Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park in search of a new home. The visuals are wondrous. Our Great National Parks is one of the most crisply photographed nature docuseries ever committed to film. The cinematography is simply stunning at times, life-affirming and achingly beautiful.
The lemurs, a critically endangered subspecies known as the von der Decken sifaka, rely of leaves for food, and water, but resources in their patch of forest are running out. The only fresh food lies in small, shaded sanctuaries scattered between the limestone peaks, amaze of craggy, razor-sharp spires between the lemurs and survival. Below lie gaping chasms. One false step would mean certain death. Baby, just eight weeks old, has to apply all his strength to cling to mom. The added weight makes it harder for the mother lemur, a single misstep could prove fatal. It’s an epic and exhausting journey for both mother and child, and a metaphor for conservation as a whole.
The sequence was made possible only through the use of drones, and drones play a key role throughout the series. The opening hour features a broad view of national parks around the world and the conservation movements that spawned them — not just lemurs in Madagascar but Old World macaques in Japan, three-toed sloths in Costa Rica, salt-water crocodiles in northern Australia, green sea turtles on Raine Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and, in a fitting end to the first hour, mountain gorillas in Rwanda.
The following episodes are more tightly focused on specific regions: Chilean Patagonia in the second hour, Kenya’s Tsavo National Park in the third hour; California’s Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary in the next hour; and finally Indonesia’s Gunung Leuser National Park, the last rainforest in Asia and home to the last natural stronghold for forest elephants, Sumatran rhinos, orangutans, and critically endangered Sumatran tigers.
The global movement of national parks has created a world where 15% of land and nearly 8% of our oceans have been protected, most of it created in the past 50 years.
Ah, but therein lies the rub. Realistically speaking — and with Earth Day in mind — 15% and 8% seem absurdly low, given that the future of the entire planet may well rest on the natural world. What happens in nature, and inside our parks, affects us all. Rainforests, for example, are home to more than half of all life on land. If you’re unsure why biodiversity is important to protect, Obama adds, consider this: A quarter of all known medicines originated in rainforests. Science is still discovering new medical advances — hiding in plain sight.
Our Great National Parks, while beautifully photographed, follows a by-now-familiar, some would say overly familiar, formula. The music is cloying and overbearing at times, swinging wildly between jaunty cutesiness to empty bombast, where silent pauses and the natural sound of the ocean, rainforest and wind-swept desert plains would have cast a more enchanting spell.
Some of the stories-within-a-story have a contrived feel to them, as if neatly tied up in a bow to fit the narrative.
And the increasingly alarming effects of climate change, global heating, extreme weather, widening pollution, biodiversity and habitat loss — just some of the reasons driving the national park idea in the first place — are relegated to the end of the first hour. A World of Wonder ends with an uplifting success story about how mountain gorillas are mounting a comeback across Central Africa: in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Virunga National Park, and Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.
It’s a drop in the bucket when weighed against all the other problems facing our world of natural wonders, but it at least offers reason for hope. In the end, Our Great National Parks is about exactly that — hope.
— Netflix
©Netflix