Alien Worlds

6/10. Some neat visuals and interesting ideas sandwiched between padding that is borderline off-topic.

It's incredible just how far this documentary seems to miss the mark. Yes, there are about 2 - 3 minutes worth of fabulous effects shots and maybe 5 minutes worth of talk about how alien life might actually develop on alien worlds, but each episode is about 40 - 45 minutes long. What is this padded with?

How to film rhinocerous beetles having sex. Uh-huh. Interesting. Not why I'm here though.

Watch me go paragliding! Okay, really not why I'm here.

5 minutes talking in very general terms about how we discover exoplanets. Okay, at least related to alien planets.

4 minutes of a falconer training a falcon. What the... ARE YOU EVEN TRYING TO MAKE A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT SCIENTIFIC THEORY ON THE TYPES OF LIFE THAT MIGHT DEVELOP ON ALIEN WORLDS!!?? I mean, I like falcons and all, but again... and I cannot stress this enough... that's not why I'm here.

There's some neat stuff in here, so it's not a total wash, but the padding, oh my the padding. I mean, some of the padding is interesting, but it's so off premise, I have to wonder why they just didn't make a series of 4 - 10 minute mini documentaries called "Neat Things on Earth."

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

The theme of the documentary is perfect with great opportunity for creativity and many potential alien worlds to portray. Each episode revolves around a potential alien world and its animals living there, which have characteristics similar to the animals on earth. The show goes back and forth between the earth animals and its alien world equivalent. The artist impression of the worlds shown and the animals living on it is well executed. Unfortunately most of the 42-minute span of each episode is spend on the earth animals and we only get to see 8-10 minutes each episode which covers the alien world, in which the same images are used several times. This is a significant limitation and probably due to budget constraints and is a major downside to the show. Other than that the concept is great and so is the storyline for each episode. 7/10

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

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.