Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Our Planet II’ On Netflix, A New Season Of The Nature Series, This Time Examining How Animals Migrate

The second season of Our Planet (dubbed Our Planet II) focuses on migration, with narrator David Attenborough describing how remarkable some of the migration patterns are of species around the world. The season runs through a typical year, starting in spring, and the hopscotches around the globe to witness migrations on both a massive and personal scale. “Only now are we beginning to understand that all life on earth depends on the freedom to move,” says Attenborough.

OUR PLANET II: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A planetary shot of Northeast Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, with two blue lines moving northeast. “Sixty thousand years ago, humans left Africa for the first time,” says narrator David Attenborough.

The Gist: We start in Botswana, as the barren winter becomes the lush spring. Cape buffalo move by the thousands across the Kalahari Desert, but a pride of lions is waiting for one of its biggest forms of prey to arrive. When one buffalo is separated from the herd, the lions team up to tire out the buffalo and ultimately take it down for a hearty meal.

Desert locusts move across from Ethiopia through the Sudan, eating everything in its path and soon turning from crawling bugs to flyers. And cameras capture one of the biggest super swarms ever recorded, with over 300 billion locusts.

In British Columbia, ancient murrelet chicks walk for miles to feed from their parents at sea, but then have to wait for their parents to come back from getting food over the water. One of the risks they and other sea birds take is that they’ll ingest too much plastic and will starve to death, a sad result of plastic waste being in the waters where their parents gather food.

A young polar bear perfects the art of hunting seals while swimming; a mama walrus stands by her calf. As spring turns to summer in the Bering Sea, plankton and krill explode in population, attracting thousands of humpback whales and sea birds to feast. As the maturing murrelet waits for a good tailwind to fly for the first time, his fellow albatrosses also try their first voyages, only to plop into the water and get eaten by tiger sharks, who have come 1000km for this meal.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The first season of Our Planet, as well as Planet Earth, produced by the same team.

Our Take: The team behind Our Planet has certainly perfected the modern nature series. There’s spectacular photography, whether the filmmakers are showing thousands of cape buffalo migrating at once or taking closeups of an ancient murrelet getting fed by his mother. Attenborough is the Vin Scully of nature documentaries, able to be both whimsical and serious, but always keeping our attention.

What stands out about this second season is its theme of migration and animals needing to move in order to live. We see some remarkable feats, like the murrelet chick walking for miles to wait at the beach, or his parents flying for thousands of kilometers to find food. The locust super swarm was mounted in a dramatic fashion, first showing the yellow blob of walkers, then the white maelstrom of flyers.

The other standout aspect is that Attenborough talks about why the seasons dictate where these animals migrate. The tilting of the earth that brings a hemisphere closer to the sun in summer and farther away from it in winter is a major contributor to where the food that these animals seek can be found. It’s interesting to see all of the information you likely learned in science class — or at least from other nature shows — put together in a way that maybe teaches you something you didn’t already know.

And while the impacts of climate change and human consumption of plastics and other non-biodegradables isn’t hammered over viewers heads, when it is mentioned, Attenborough drives its impact home with emphasis. You can’t help but cringe when you see sea birds standing among tons of plastic waste on the beach, or see young albatrosses dead from ingesting too much plastic. There isn’t any subtlety in those segments, and there shouldn’t be. Human intervention is having a massive negative effect on the planet, and that’s as much a part of this migration story as the movement of the animals.

What Age Group Is This For?: Any nature lover 7 and up that can tolerate “circle of life” type of footage — i.e. animals dying at the hands of other animals — will enjoy Our Planet II.

Parting Shot: The ancient murrelet we’ve been following is about to fly for the first time. Will he make it, and not touch solid ground again for five years, or will he get eaten by a shark?

Sleeper Star: We always give credit to the cinematographers who end up taking such spectacular footage for these shows, here under the direction of Toby Nowlan.

Most Pilot-y Line: Really, we can’t find fault with anything here. Even the goofy music that accompanies the murrelet chick’s initial journey isn’t all that goofy.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Our Planet II is chock full of spectacular scenes of animals on the move, but it also shows us things we might not have known about the whys and hows of how certain species migrate.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.