We recommend this moving, plainly spoken account of environmental loss, built around Attenborough’s own experience. Its wildlife images and quiet delivery are persuasive; the practical questions about changing course receive less attention than they need.
David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet is a persuasive, upsetting documentary whose confidence in making things better sometimes runs ahead of its explanations. Directors Jonathan Hughes, Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey organise it around Attenborough’s recollections, setting the damage to the natural world against the span of his life. The personal approach gives the scale of that damage something we can grasp without pretending that it is small. They keep the running time to 83 minutes without making the losses feel like a checklist.
The opening at Chernobyl establishes that this will not be a comfortable succession of animals to admire. It is a blunt place to begin, and the comparison with wider environmental damage risks doing some of the thinking for us. Attenborough’s calm delivery keeps the warning from becoming a lecture shouted across a room. He speaks about losses within his own lifetime, and his composure makes the account harder to dismiss.
Gavin Thurston’s cinematography lets us enjoy looking at the wildlife, which matters in a film so concerned with its disappearance. The photography offers the pleasure we expect from a wildlife documentary, but the surrounding images of destruction make that pleasure uneasy. Editor Martin Elsbury gives the before-and-after material enough force that the statistics do not have to carry the account alone. Those comparisons give the figures a clear, visible meaning.
We were more upset than we expected by the endangered creatures looking straight into the camera. The directness of those images, placed within this account of loss, made the danger feel particular rather than distant. Attenborough does not need to sound distraught for that feeling to reach us, and the film is strongest when it respects his restraint. Steven Price’s music sometimes presses too firmly at such moments, underlining a sadness that the faces and the voice have already made clear.
The weakness is in how quickly a shared concern can become a shared responsibility, with the differences between us blurred. We wanted a tougher examination of who can make changes at scale, and what prevents them from doing so. Hughes, Fothergill and Scholey make the broad case so accessible that the awkward practical questions can feel like interruptions to be hurried past. That matters when the film asks us to believe that action is possible.
The film also has to contend with a familiar difficulty of wildlife documentaries: admiration can be a pleasantly passive activity. Attenborough’s presence helps it get past that, because his recollections connect the spectacle to a life spent paying attention. There is little novelty in the broad warning, but presenting familiar information this clearly is worthwhile. He speaks plainly, with an expectation that we will take the information seriously. Watch it when there is time to talk afterwards, particularly about the practical questions it leaves open.
