The Rules of Life

No idea what was their goal with this episode, the constant back and forth made it impossible to actually follow along with any interest, it was just so distracting, it lacked cohesion to the point it made the narration feel dull. The moment you got interested in any animal or section of the episode, you'd blink, and suddenly they're focusing on something else, it makes no sense.

The visuals are nice, but everything else is meh, I have no idea why they went with this format for the first episode, it makes me not want to keep watching the series. This felt like an extended trailer for the whole thing.

I know there are many series like this, including ones with very similar names like Life on Earth but I think this may be my favorite of them all. I won't write individual reviews for each episode, which seems absurd, so this is for the series overall.

One unique thing about this series, which I liked, is the way they intersperse footage of modern-seeming species like cockroaches and sea turtles with ancient species, because the cockroaches and sea turtles shared the planet with pterosaurs and six-foot-long millipedes. That lends reality to the proceedings.

The series also details the cause and impact of several mass extinctions, not just the familiar one that knocked out the dinosaurs, with the exception of a few avian dinosaurs that went on to develop into birds.

Which makes me wonder, what if they'd died too? Would all the roles of birds, from condors to eagles to parrots to hummingbirds, be filled by a plethora of flying mammals that branched off from bats?

The overall message is that, it may be sad that we don't have trilobites or triceratops around now, but they left space for the species we do have, that otherwise would not have developed (like us).

It seems like in contemporary filmed narrative nobody understands anymore the concept of proceeding in chronological order. This is supposed to be a documentary about the evolution and extinction of life on Earth, what's wrong with proceeding from the "start", 4 billion years ago and moving forward?

Apparently a lot, because the first episode starts 2 million years ago with a couple of feline predators stalking a huge bird, then jumps forward to the present day, then back again, then there's an interlude about caterpillars and then we're back to the felines jumping on the bird, only to be told that the series will be about life on Earth and how 99% of living species went extinct, mentioning inevitably the dinosaurs - but again showing them at the very beginning, with the hatching of their eggs and at the end, at the time of the asteroid's collision, therefore jumping back and forward a "mere" 150 million years.

Why oh why? The animated CGI creatures looks good enough to me and Freeman's narration is OK, it's just the structure that is extremely off-putting.