And in what is probably my particular favorite segment in “Green Seas,” an especially ornery octopus female runs eight-armed rings around her predators - hiding under shells, slipping under rocks, and in one amazing sequence, suffocating a shark until it leaves her alone. In addition to visiting with new creatures, the documentarians pursue new stories on animals that have already been covered in earlier series: sea turtles, penguins, otters, albatrosses. She’s interested, but they keep getting interrupted by - what else? - the incoming waves, which force them to jump to higher rocks. In the episode “Coasts,” a couple of leaping blennies spot each other at a local watering hole and make fishy eyes at each other, prompting the male to turn black and wave his orange crest - his form of flirting. One irritated Garibaldi fish has to keep clearing pesky sea urchins off his little plot of algae, with all the tedious resignation of a father chasing off squirrels. It is both relatable and astonishing, how much birds and fish seem to worry about the same things that we and our neighbors do. “Blue Planet II,” like “Planet Earth II” before it, is narrated by David Attenborough, and thanks to his combination of droll amusement and matter-of-fact framing of tragedies, he draws the viewer into the individual dramas of animals that you couldn’t name just five minutes before. “Blue Planet II” is a vehicle designed for wonder, and it is practically impossible to not be awed - by the size and scale of the ocean, by its biodiversity, by the surprisingly universal efforts that animals go through to defend and raise their precious offspring. ![]() The crew managed to strap cameras onto whales and worm their lenses into the hidey-hole nests of puffins they capture sea lions teaming up to trap tuna, a whale shark the size of a “small aircraft,” and humpback whales breaching after a well-earned meal of plankton. The images are so clear - and so strange, because the ocean is really weird - that they are almost too good to be true, like a CGI dreamscape of an alien world. Even viewed on my laptop, the cinematography was arresting. Whatever the reason, “Blue Planet II” is jaw-dropping. To study the oceans is to study the weather, too, so at times “Blue Planet II” zooms out so far, you watch hurricanes bloom and dissipate in the Atlantic Ocean. ![]() ![]() Or, because there are seemingly infinite ways to dramatically intermingle light and water, whether that is bioluminescent bacteria twinkling like stars in the deep ocean or the way rays of sunlight filter through surface waters to illumine vast kelp forests. Perhaps this is due to the essential, romantic mystery that humans have ascribed to the ocean for most of recorded history - a mystery that bears out, considering that the oceans are still 95% unexplored, and less understood than the surface of Mars, despite occupying 70% of our planet’s real estate. At the time I saw “Planet Earth II,” it seemed as if that was the pinnacle of nature documentary filmmaking. This equipment is on top of the hundreds of human hours spent underwater hanging out with sea creatures - discovering the relevant animal behaviors, finding them, and then taking all that tech down to film.īut even if you are braced for a glorious production, “Blue Planet II” is likely to take your breath away. The producers developed their own camera system and lenses, shot in lush 4K, and used a massive bubble-like megadome lens to immerse the viewer half-in and half-out of the water, that beautifully liminal space on the surface. As the producers told Variety, the gear used in “Blue Planet II” was crucial for getting the intimate footage of some of the world’s most remote and elusive animals. Needless to say, the technology available to filmmakers covering the natural world has made leaps and bounds since then. But while “Planet Earth II” followed “Planet Earth” by a decade, “The Blue Planet,” the original installment of the BBC Natural History Unit’s docuseries about the oceans, debuted almost 20 years ago in 2001. ![]() “ Blue Planet II” premieres this weekend, just one year after its sister series “Planet Earth II” returned for a second, triumphant series.
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