Les Mondes extraterrestres

The show itself is very interesting to me. Unfortunately, it spends a lot of time talking about life on earth when the title is clearly supposed to be about other planets.

For a documentary in theory set on alien planet it focus half of time on vanity shots of Earth people, instead of filling that time explaining how would be posible the life shown. In that way, the 2005 show from National Geographic, although not so visually stunning, was a much better documentary.

Love the premise of this Netflix mini-series, which is: suppose you have an exoplanet with certain features (high gravity, oxygen-rich...) and, using comparative biology and special effects, imagine what kind of lifeforms could evolve there. It's the sort of stuff a committed science fiction writer would feverishly write pages and pages about for his world-building; as an unapologetic nerd, I kind of dig that.

CGI is impressive, although at least 50% of the run-time of each episode is devoted to short documentary segments about animal life on Earth. On one hand this is perfectly undestandable for reasons of budget (I imagine CGI of this quality is insanely expensive, so you need to pad out the length) and especially to compare the imagined alien lifeforms to known ones.

On the other hand, these comparisons often feel too broad and forced, so they are sort of hit-and-miss. For example, we skip from the dangers faced by young "sky grazers" on "Atlas" (the high-gravity planet which starts the series) before they learn to fly to... baby meerkats facing scorpions? As much as I find meerkats adorable, I don't quite see the connection other than the very generic "young animals are in constant danger in the wild". Given the "sky grazers" anatomy and life cycle, the race to the ocean of baby turtles would have been a far more appropriate comparison.

Neat concept, though.

7/10

70% of this show is about Earth and how the planet and everything on it adapts to hostile and ever changing circumstances and how this might be similar on other planets. And 'might' is the key word here because they present these alien worlds like they've actually been there when really, it is just something that could be and not something that surely is. Interesting for sure but not very convincing and pretty far fetched at times.

The thing that bothered me the most is that they overuse the images from the alien worlds to such an extend that is becomes ridiculous. If you would condens the unique material of the alien world for each episode it would probably just be 5 minutes. In the second episode I started tracking how many times they would use certain fragments and some are used more than 10 times throughout the episode.

So in the end this feels like a documentary about life on earth in hostile situations. With some cool images from made up places that could be in our universe.

75% of each episode goes on what's happening in earth. And they show one cgi scene for 4-5 times. If wanna hear about earth and species here would have just watch NatGeo. Disappointing. So much for something called AliEn WoRlDs