Netflix usually has a tough time being tough-it frequently cuts out rather than observe violence. Perhaps in a family-kind way, it repeats that pattern to a lesser degree in Surviving Paradise: A Family Tale, in which directors Matt Meech and Renee Godfrey take a year on the Okavango Delta of the Kalahari Desert to trace how prominent animal families survive the hostile home.
As motifs go, this survival doc goes as far as it can, to a successful degree, to hammer home that survival for the constantly-moving animal population is family, whether lion or painted wolf, water buffalo or impala. If they stay within the circle of their family, usually headed by mother, they will be safe, fed, and loved.
Amidst the gorgeous photography, be it aerial shots of the expansive desert over which countless herds roam or the hypnotising eye of a lion, is the constant hunt of one species for another. While occasionally a kill happens, Netflix can be counted on to avoid the blood or just cut away once an animal has another with the deadly vampire neck bite.
Surviving Paradise is appropriate for family because it is about family and its warm, protecting embrace in the face of ever-present danger. The sequences with the lioness guiding and protecting her pride are saturated with sweetness, and, well, humanity. Dad is older now and unable to protect them, adding a modern touch to the emergence of women as primary providers. The baby elephant couldn't be cuter or safer when trotting under mother.
Credit should be given to the narration by Rege-Jean Page, whose soft modulation sucks out the terror and makes us believe it is all Nature's way. His veiled allusions to climate change is a tribute to all the filmmakers-the truth they show with their cameras is all you need to know about our responsibility to protect in the way the lioness does her babies.
Netflix gets it right, perhaps erring only on the side of innocence, an unwillingness to show the gory reality of the hunt. I can think of worse faults.
